Yes, The IRS never complains about taking your tax money. If you only want to defer 1/3 and pay the tax this year on 2/3, that would be acceptable, Depending on your tax situation, you want to make sure the other 1/3 you want to include this year is not pushing you into a higher bracket. Whereby, if you split the distribution into 3 years and stayed in a lower bracket each year, your total amount of tax on the distribution would be lower versus paying more tax in 2020 due to being pushed into a higher marginal tax rate by the other 1/3 distribution. Once the form is active you, can try it both ways in TurboTax then look at your marginal tax rate and see if it goes up when including the other 1/3 this year.
Form 8915-E: Qualified 2020 Disaster Retirement Plan Distributions and Repayments, which is used for COVID-related early distributions, will be e-fileable starting 2/24. The IRS is updating form 5329’s instructions to make it clear that COVID related exceptions cannot use 5329 and should use the new 8915-E.
From what I have found, California is coupling with the retirement provisions of the Cares Act.
