"Following Irene's guidance and checking Schedule 1 line 8 is does indeed show $-5211 however line 5b shows $ 2606 while line 5 a shows $15564."
Thank you for asking this. The line 8 amount (Other income) should be equal to your taxable Social Security benefits, which is line 5b.
What you want is for the SS taxable income to have no effect on your Adjusted Gross Income.
For line 5b to change may be because you have changed your non-SS income; as you know, not all of your SS benefits are taxable, but the more you have "outside" income (i.e., other than SS), the more of the SS benefits become taxable.
So, are you able to get the return in a place where lines 5b and 8 are the mirror opposites (positive and negative, that is)? If so, this part of your project is done.
"The CPA set line 5b to zero but did not add any negative income to offset the SS income. " This would be perfectly fine if you were doing your return on paper. With TurboTax, we just have a different way of getting to the same goal.
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