Traditional IRA Value as of 12/31/24

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 28, 2025
3 replies
35 views

I have used TurboTax for many years and have filed form 8606 without disclosing the value of my IRAs. This year was the first year that I had a distrbution from one of my traditional IRAs. I again skipped the question about the value of my IRAs as I had done for many years. But this year that created an error. Unfortunately, TurboTax did not alert me to the error as I thought it should have. Since I answered that I had received a distribution from an IRA, why didn't TT notice that the line asking for the value of my IRAs was blank and flag that for me? I think TT should fix this. I don't think I'm the first person to experience this. TT does a nice error search at the end of inputting the federal data, but it only give you a false sense of condidence that there aren't any errors....

DanaB27

Employee Tax Expert

If you skip the value question then TurboTax assumes your value was $0 at the end of 2024 when you leave the field blank. If you haven't filed then please go back to the retirement section to edit your entry.

Click on "Search" on the top right and type “1099-R”
Click on “Jump to 1099-R”
On the "Review your 1099-R info" screen click "Continue"
Answer "Yes" to "Any nondeductible Contributions to your IRA?" if you had any nondeductible contributions in prior years.
Answer the questions about the basis from line 14 of your 2023 Form 8606 and the value of all traditional, SEP, and SIMPLE IRAs

If you already filed your return then please see How do I amend my federal tax return for this year?

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dmertz

Level 15

"why didn't TT notice that the line asking for the value of my IRAs was blank and flag that for me? I think TT should fix this."

Several times I've posed this question to TurboTax forum moderators who I believe passed it along to the TurboTax Product Quality group. My concerns with regard to this were apparently ignored. As a result, TurboTax continues to blindly accept a blank entry for this value as meaning zero.

As you indicate, whenever Form 8606 reports a traditional IRA distribution TurboTax should flag a blank year-end value entry as an error. To me it seems like lazy programming to just treat the omission as user error. It baffles me that they would not implement such a simple check when over the years they have corrected over 50 other more complex TurboTax problems that I've reported related to retirement contributions and distributions.

HoagHavenAuthor

Level 2

Wow! TT should listen to you! It seems like an easy fix. If I had not caught it, I would have filed with a pretty big error. Large enough to get the attention of the IRS.

Thank you for your response and the validation of my concern.