Retirement tax questions

First, you need to clarify what you did with the trustee.  

 

Even if you have a designated Roth account in your 401k, employer contributions (match) are pre-tax and must be held in a separate pre-tax account.  If you do a direct trustee transfer, the Roth IRA trustee should refuse to accept a transfer from a pre-tax account, and should instead transfer that money into a traditional pre-tax IRA for you.  Alternatively, if you intentionally put the pre-tax money into a Roth IRA, that would be a conversion, and is fully taxable in the year it happened.  You will get a 1099-R and must report the conversion on your tax return and pay income tax.

 

If you did an indirect rollover, where you got a check from plan A and deposited it yourself in plan B, then you could have made this mistake.  You should have gotten separate checks from the pre-tax and Roth 401k accounts.  If you deposited them both into the Roth IRA, then one was a rollover and one was a conversion.  You also violated the once-per-year limit on indirect rollovers.

 

So did you accidentally do a conversion?  Were these direct transfers or indirect?  What date did this occur?  (In 2024?  More or less than 60 days ago?)

 

At worst, you have a taxable conversion, but a conversion is not a contribution, so you can still make contributions.  But you need to make sure this is reported correctly by bank B.  If you don't want to do a taxable conversion, then you may be able to reverse the transaction, but it depends on the timing.

 

@dmertz