Thanks for all your suggestions. For context at the time:
- It was on the desktop version of TurboTax
- I tried both with minus sign and with parentheses
- I tried in forms mode
- This is not a number which TurboTax needed to calculate for me; it's a number I had to copy from a given K-1
- ...
You get the picture. In fact I called TurboTax support on the phone. They checked internally and admitted that it was a known bug in the software. At the time they couldn't commit to a fix date. Since there was no way to work around this TurboTax bug they gave me a refund for the state product --- one has to use some other product or file a paper return.
HTH.
