Form 1099-Q in TT is showing a different amount for QHEE than what I entered in Step by Step Educational Expenses section.

DJF · ‎June 4, 2019

I noticed that the college expenses for one child that I put in Step by Step (tuition, fees, room and board, books) are not all accounted for in the Forms 1099-Q in the "QTP Computation of Taxable Distribution" section line 2b. When I click on the box/number in 2b, it doesn't show the Data Source. How do I find out why TT premier thinks some of our college expenses are not allowed?

>> Update: I found the reason. In the Step by Step Education information, it has the value of 10K in the "Amount Used to Calculate Education Deduction/Credit". I did not put the 10K there, so I assume it is some default value and I missed that in my first pass thru step-step. I changed that to 0, since our AGI is way to high for associated education credits, and then it made all the college expenses as qualified. (I believe that in prior years, TT had some auto/tool to help figure that out, and it was always buggy, and I think I always ended up manually setting this to 0.) After doing this, my refund was increased accordingly.

Anita01 · ‎June 4, 2019

When you go through the education expense section, you have to choose how much of the expenses you want to allocate to the credits and how much to your tax-free distribution. It doesn't benefit you to choose more than $4,000. Go back through and see what you entered there in the education expenses section.

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DJF · ‎June 4, 2019

As I indicated, there was a default value of 10K in that field, and when I set it to 0, then everything was correct. Why wouldn't the default by 4K? (or maybe it is, and it was my mistake.)