I'm not a tax professional. My staff accountant wife who has passed the CPA exam but didn't do the apprenticeship is closer, but still has me do it because I trade Listed Stock Options with Margin Interest. Professionals can screw those up.
OTOH, my two daughters, now 21 and 27, had UTMAs and now regular accounts their entire lives, so I've been dealing with Kiddie Tax, both Federal and California for decades… In TurboTax, and MacInTax before they bought it.
One thing I'm not seeing in this discussion and I'm wondering if people are remembering to do is that child with Kiddie Tax is not suppose to be claimed on the parental return. I'm not seeing an easy way to do this other than delete the child for federal and add them back in for states who do it the old grabby way (like California - guess where we live… 😅). If I don't delete that child, TurboTax doesn't seem to give me an option to just do a radio button and not claim them. They do ask on the child's return about whether someone is claiming them as a dependent but running things out last night with the 8615, TurboTax seems to ignore this conflict.
FYI, TCJA eliminated the need to manually link the parental return to their dependents and each of them to each other at the federal level. Unfortunately, in states like California, they're still linked together, so one person (in our case, me) must do the returns all together. And just for those who keep thinking it's a ripoff, my daughter has an over $3300 higher Federal Tax bill because something in TurboTax ran it the pre-TCJA way.
Oh, and the trust tax rate isn't just for over $500k, although it might have changed from when my mother died in 2002 and I had to administer her Living Trust, which you all should set up so those you leave behind can avoid Probate Court. Back then, I *had* to have a professional do it because one could only do trusts in TurboTax in a Windows Only version. And I had to file an amended trust return because he *swore* Margin Interest wasn't deductible (Form 4952).
