In 2019, I used TurboTax Business 2018 to begin the process of winding down my deceased parent's estate. In 2020, I purchased TurboTax Business 2019 to complete the process. The TT 2019 installation transferred information from the TT 2018 filing, and correctly recognized it as a decedent's Estate. But it failed to generate form K-1 for the beneficiaries. There were no K-1s in the final report for filing, and when I clicked the button to generate K-1s, it declined to do so and told me that I needed to provide the names of shareholders (or something like that). It clearly seems to be confused because form 1041 is used for both partnerships and Estates, the former has shareholders, the latter has beneficiaries. I had provided the names (and other details) of the beneficiaries.
This is potentially a big deal, because there are a lot of people like myself who rely on TT to help us sort out unfamiliar tax situations. An executor is responsible to provide K-1s to beneficiaries, and anyone who fails to do that could be fined. TT doesn't even give an error message, so anyone acting as executor won't necessarily know that the program is not doing something that its supposed to do.
I ran the process a second time, declining to transfer from the 2018 return and opting to manually enter that information on my own. Then it generated the K-1s, but it left out important information, which apparently is the subject of yet another TT K-1 bug, described here: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/business-taxes/discussion/estate-1041-k-1-box-11c/01/641846#M25333
Hey Intuit: you need to fix this, or people will start talking about how they missed out on a huge tax break because their executor used TurboTax to generate their K1 forms.
