Entering 1098-T in TurboTax Home and Business for Mac 2019

itamaeDevDad · ‎July 15, 2020

Is there a bug in the Education Expenses section of the Easy Step interview? I have gone through this section at least 5 times and there was NO WAY to enter our 1098-T data for any part of this form, including Box 1 - Payments received for qualified tuition and related expenses, Box 5 - Scholarships or grants, etc. The interview immediately skips to Did XXX Pay for Books or Materials to attend school? And the row for Tuition and enrollment fees shows $0. When I clicked on the link, it said, ‘You entered this earlier.’ Uh no. I didn’t. But oddly all of the 1098-T demographic data was there - my kids’ names, colleges, addresses, etc. Most likely transferred from prior year. What the heck? Eventually I realized that I had to go directly to the forms to enter this data. There was literally no other way. Did someone delete a view?? I’m on a 2017 MacBook Pro - Catalina 10.15.5.

Hal_Al · ‎July 15, 2020

I'm not specifically familiar with Mac. But here's the standard answer for both Windows and online users:

Go through the entire education interview until you reach a screen titled "Your Education Expenses Summary". Click edit next to the student's name. That should take you to a screen “Here’s your Education Summary”. Click edit next to the section you want to change; tuition, in your case.

itamaeDevDad · ‎July 15, 2020

Thank you! That works on TurboTax for Mac as well. I was never able to get to that entry screen through the earlier, main part of the Education Expenses interview. This will be helpful, I think, for any other Mac user who runs into this issue. But the developers should really fix this in the Easy Step process. It really throws off the user when you can’t enter tuition and fees and that shows up as zero, but then later you enter scholarships and grants, only to have TurboTax tell you that the scholarship amount you entered is then taxable income to the student!

Thanks again.