Deductions & credits

Thank you @AmeliesUncle for your feedback.

With respect to the potential that the lack of APTC on my 1095-A could lead to my Fed return not rejecting if I avoid entering my son's 1095-A info where indicated in TTax, I have a low confidence level. TTax is assertive in their help areas that e-filing a return before receiving one's 1095-A (and thus subsequently entering them into TTax) will result in a rejection by the IRS. Verbiage I have found elsewhere on the Internet is consistent with this, including identification of a specific error code (which I didn't retain but could be found again). I believe everything in this area is thought out by the IRS and actively supported by TTax / Intuit (as well as by other efile software companies). I believe they want to force 1095-A entries for all Marketplace subscribers in order to ensure APTC reconciliation for the subset to which ATPC applies, even to the extent that some small(?) subset of the Marketplace subscribers get a PTC that they don't deserve (for those who know little to nothing of the tax laws associated with this area and just follow the Step-by-Step questionnaires that their tax prep software presents to them). I cannot otherwise understand why TTax would not have any screening questions in this area that could result in disqualifying a user from the PTC prior to entering their 1095-A data; it's uncharacteristic of TTax otherwise, and I don't believe it was an oversight.

With respect to the second suggestion of replacing the 1095-A SLCSP data with low values, I did go down that path to see what happens in TTax (using $1 per month instead of your suggested $0.01 per month, but any value below the calculated "Monthly Contribution Amount" on Form 8962 would apparently suffice). As a result, the PTC calculated on Form 8962 did end up being zero, which would be the goal for my son's case, given his ineligibility for PTC due to his employer offering a health insurance plan that is minimum essential coverage.

Note that due to the PTC being calculated as zero for this experiment, Form 8962 does not appear to be a form that will be included in the official return, as 8962 is not included in the group of material that TTax lists when printing out "All official forms required for filing." In fact, 8962 is not included in any of the predefined groups of forms that can be printed. It would have to be specified by number to get it printed (and probably only when viewing it while in TTax "Form" mode). However, the 1095-A information I entered is part of the "key calculations" and "all calculations" groupings that TTax allows you to select for printing.

Which leads to my last, critical question if one goes down this path of generating a zero PTC. If the Form 8962 is not included in the information filed with the IRS due to the PTC being zero (and no APTC to reconcile), how does the IRS know that the user entered their 1095-A info to get to that point? Does TTax include any such indication as part of the info it sends to the IRS when e-filing one's return, if there is no inclusion of a Form 8962 with the return proper? I obviously don't want my son's e-file to be rejected in this case; I'm not sure there would be another recourse other than going with paper filing - and I do have a fuzzy recollection regarding reading or hearing about one or more cases in the distant past where a rejected e-file that was followed up by paper filing had "problems" being processed. I don't recall specifics, so I cannot assert with any reasonable confidence that such a scenario would be problematict.

Thanks again.

Doug