The program says that QBI Passive Op Loss m/b entered. I keep the business open, have zero income from it, but expenses for licenses and insurance. What $ do I enter?

[ThomasM125 · Accepted solution]

The QBI loss from the business would be the net loss for the year, so in this case it would be the total of the expenses, since you had no income. 

[Diana46]

Problem: Federal Review is asking for Schedule E QBI Passive Operating Loss and Passive Operating Loss but does not indicate which fields are missing.

Solution: Probably zero (0). 

I worked with two specialists and an expert this evening to interpret what appears to be a coding bug. In the rental property sales carryover section, Passive loss and QBI deduction ask for a by-year value to be entered. If the total loss spans multiple years, and some of the loss is from prior to 2018, one should be able to enter 0 (zero) in the 2018 & 2019 fields, however, the page will not accept the value zero.

During the Federal Review, I was redirected to check the values for the Schedule E form to fill out the Passive Operating Loss and QBI Operating Loss, yet, there are no fields with these titles and it was unclear what to complete (no fields were being highlighted by the system to indicate what is missing). When I entered a value, the next message indicated that the number could not be greater than zero. I entered a negative value (I suspected this was incorrect) and clicked Continue. I was greeted with a Success message that didn't feel accurate. So I navigated back to the original Carryover section and confirmed my suspicions; the original entry is not allowing zero, yet the form is requiring zero in the 2018 and 2019 fields. I corrected the values I had changed in the Federal Review, left 2018 and 2019 blank, returned to the Federal Review section and added zeros when prompted for the missing values.

I believe this is a bug and will cause folks to enter an incorrect value. Hopefully, mine is correct.