dmertz
Level 15

Retirement tax questions

I found your comment to an answer I gave a year ago indicating that your code H Form 1099-R has box 2b Taxable amount not determined marked.  I forgot all about the fact that TurboTax will treat as taxable a code H Form 1099-R with that box marked and a blank box 2a.  That's the cause of the symptom you are seeing.  I'm glad to see that you stuck with it.

You have an improperly prepared Form 1099-R from the payer.  A code H Form 1099-R is required to have a zero in box 2a and box 2b Taxable amount not determined NOT marked.  It's odd that TurboTax treats a code H Form 1099-R with this error as taxable, but it seems to be such a rare occurrence that the payer makes this error that it hasn't raised the attention of the TurboTax Product Quality folks.  I think it's unlikely that TurboTax's behavior with regard to this will change before the filing deadline since the problem has been in TurboTax for years.

As a workaround, simply enter a zero in box 2a.  Since there is no tax withholding in box 4, the details of what you enter on TurboTax's 1099-R form are not included in the e-filing, so the fact that you entered a zero in box 2a will not be apparent to the IRS.  What *will* be apparent to the IRS is that your tax return shows the distribution correctly as nontaxable.

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