dmertz
Level 15

Retirement tax questions

As TurboTaxChristinaS indicated, this is entirely taxable to you.  Any amounts that you gave to others are gifts from you to them.  If the amount you gifted to any one person exceeds that annual gift-tax exclusion amount for 2016 of $14,000, you must file Form 709 to report the gift.

What people often do in this situation is reduce the amount of the gift to each person by the amount of tax liability incurred on that portion of the distribution from the IRA.  This allows those to whom you gift these amounts to effectively share the tax burden.