I really appreciate your message with its helpful tips. I will be sure to check the Tax Payments on the 1040 in the future, and not just rely on having entered the 1099-R into TurboTax (TT). I may also consider waiting until later in the filing season before I file my return. The TT program should explicitly warn users of the software about this. I don't recall having "imported" this 1099-R directly from the broker into TT, and likely entered the 1099-R info manually.
But it still seems to me that when a Form 1099-R is accurately entered into TT the program should flawlessly transfer the Tax Withheld figure to the 1040. I've used TT for years and this has never been a problem. The programming for this should be well-established and should not need to be tweaked. Unless gremlins invaded the computer electronics of TT, it seems hard for TT to justify having an error of this sort in the program.
Another apparent glitch issue is that when I pull up my 2020 return, that tax withheld error has been corrected, maybe due to some software update. But now numbers I had on my original return on Form 8606, lines 5 through 13 are missing when I pull up the return online. Why? The second tax expert at TT, Anna, could not tell me. The TT program should not "lose" parts of my return data entries (which had not been changed). If I had to amend this return again, I'd have to fix these newfound errors, but at least no need to right now. The TT experts told me that my problem might have come from switching between the "step-by-step" method and the "Forms" method, but I find that implausible. I've often done that in other tax years and it has never seemed to cause any problem.
In early August 2022, I'd filed a 1040X (prepared with TT Premier 2020) to claim the refund for the previously unreported Tax Withheld on this 1099-R, and one of the tax experts told me that it gets merged into my TT return. So I see icons for two tax returns for 2020, but only one of them says "continue." Why show two icons when only one is operational?
Finally, I guess I probably did start working on my return too early in the filing season, that is in January 2021. I had to notify TT then of another glitch relating to a 1099-R. TT emailed me saying, in part:
Turbo Tax also wants to thank you for pointing out that the answer you gave on
your 1099R goes back to the default of "NO" when it should have stayed checked
"Yes" on the periodic payment question of your 1099R. I have forwarded this to
our IT department to let them know about the issue and hopefully they will resolve
the issue.
Similarly, I noticed, when going over my 2020 return with those two tax experts that we kept on having to select answers using "radio buttons" that had already been selected before, but those selected buttons were not shown as selected. I think it did not matter whether I saved the return or not after selecting those buttons. TT should fix this so that the answers stay as you entered them.
In sum, there seems to be a lot of "glitches" in the TT Premier 2020 program. I hope TT fixes all of these.
