To get a simplified foreign tax credit, the IRS is quite clear that you don't have to fill out Form 1116 if you paid taxes to a foreign country on a passive investment reported to you on a 1099-DIV and your total foreign taxes paid is under $300.
But Turbotax won't let you do this! TT insists instead on forcing taxpayers to file the unnecessary and complex Form 1116 and then gets the form wrong because TT doesn't provide enough decimal places for the calculation on line 19. It comes out to me as .0000. Which is 0. So no credit. If there were just one more decimal place allowed, I could get my tax credit.
The only workaround solution -- which I've found and I hate -- is to lie to the IRS and artificially increase the supposed foreign income earned just to make that .0000 go to .0001. Then TT gives you your credit that you should have gotten all along without even needing Form 1116.
I guess lying to the IRS isn't terrible when 1) I can prove that 1) The actual credit received is the right one I could have gotten if I hadn't filed 1116, and 2) I can also prove that Turbotax (online 2024 version) REQUIRES taxpayers to lie to the IRS to get the proper credit.
Still I hate to do this and I'm posting this here so if I ever get audited, I can prove that it is entirely Turbotax's fault for forcing taxpayers to lie on an unnecessary form to get the proper credit.
If anyone knows how I can get the proper credit in Turbotax without filing Form 1116 (as is allowed by the IRS Form Instructions for Form 1116 in my case) or lying to the IRS, please let me know.
Otherwise I have to tell the IRS that Turbotax forced me to lie. And I really really don't want to do that.
