I find TurboTax's ability to download complex brokerage forms extremely helpful.
Today I received an email from Charles Schwab informing me that my 1099 Composite is now available.
It's great news that my investment tax information is ready earlier than promised this year.
Unfortunately TurboTax is 'hard coded' to block any attempt to download this information before the "official" availability date. Rather than allowing me to enter login information and check the server I'm blocked from doing so with unhelpful messages such as:
"According to Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. documents will be ready for import on following dates
Form 1099-B available from Saturday, 18 February 2023 at 00:00:00 PT onwards ...
Being actively blocked from accessing my financial information by TurboTax for the next two weeks is an unnecessary annoyance. I'm sure there are lots of excuses that sound great to the programmers but this is pretty insufferable for the end user.
While I cannot comment as to the programmer's reasons, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the announced day of release is also to protect their investors from receiving a corrected 1099-Composite after the initial release and then having to file an amended return. It is not uncommon for a corrected form to be sent out from the larger investment firms causing the recipient to make changes if they have yet to file or amend if they previously did file.
That's an interesting bit of speculation.
I can't attest to how often corrected forms are sent out.
In 25+ years of investing I've never received a revised 1099 from a brokerage.
Probably the special files to import to tax programs are not ready yet from Schwab even though the 1099 pdf file is ready. That's common. Most places aren't ready to import until mid to late Feb. And I know in the past Wells Fargo and Vanguard have sent out corrected 1099s later. WF once sent out 2 or 3 corrected 1099 forms.
Seriously? There are no "special files". It's the same financial data used to generate the PDF forms.
It appears that there's no shortage of speculative, overly complicated, nonsensical, and hocus-pocus explanations for something quite simple: TurboTax is set to block the user from downloading their data until an arbitrary date.
I rolled the clock forward three weeks on my computer and downloaded the pertinent data.
This is just a lazy, arbitrary, and end-user hostile "feature".
In this case TurboTax provides roadblocks rather than assistance in gathering my financial data.
I'll wait until April to submit and pay my taxes leaving more than enough time for corrections or updates should any be needed.
There are special files. Sure, it's the same data, but Schwab has to create a file in a special format for TurboTax to import. We don't know what steps Schwab goes through to prepare the files.
The availability date is set by Schwab, not by TurboTax. People have been able to import from other brokers already. If you trick TurboTax into letting you import data that Schwab says is not ready, I would assume that the data you get might be wrong. And they will not send a corrected report if they change the data prior to the date they said it was available.
The data that Schwab informed me was ready and that they provided is all correct.
As previously pointed out TurboTax simply blocks the import based on an arbitrary date.
Thank you for the information, Fixate. My data is available today from Schwab but blocked by Turbotax until the 18th. Not sure what the strategy is there but it makes no sense to me.