Thanks Martin for your comment regarding experience. It is that sort of experience I'd like to hear about. Based on your point (that people who do not get audited do not have a confirmed experience of the sort described) then I guess the absence of experienced responses may suggest an absence of audits (not that that is at all a reliable metric).
Somebody must have followed the instructions! What happened?!? What didn't happen?
Btw, your reference to "Enter the total number of days..." is contained within the section that the IRS says not to complete when you have used the property as a main home for the last five years. The publication says DO NOT enter the days at all and instead skip to section C.
I hear clearly that you are one of the people who believe the publication is presenting a mistaken test for skipping. I am not qualified to disagree (or, for that matter, agree). If you would like to see experts disagree you can check out these intuit questions:
https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/investments-and-rental-properties/discussion/capital-gains-from-th...
https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/taxes/discussion/selling-primary-residence-that-was-initially-a-va...
However, argue about that in THOSE threads. This one is about IRS behavior.
My lay takeaway from those threads, fwiw, is the "Experts" say you can follow pub523, skip B and take the full exclusion (excepting of course depreciation recovery) while those without "Expert" in their profile say something to the effect that the law disagrees with pub523 and nothing can possibly have changed how the law is interpreted since it was enacted in 2008. A more trusting person would see the experts lining up on just one side of this and do their taxes accordingly. I, perhaps sadly, look before I leap and thus would like to know how these things actually turn out.
