TurboTax Early Rounding Issues creating LARGE variances between TurboTax Produced Return and Brokerage 1099-B Data

[Anonymous]

There has to be something deeper going on here?  How can one of the most popular tax software programs out there have such an egregious/outstanding issue, that is surely affecting thousand of filers (whether or not they know it), with little to no communication on addressing it?  

[manojgumber]

Same issue is affecting me as well. Requesting TurboTax to resolve it at the earliest

[MaxTax00]

Regarding anyone from TurboTax saying you CAN round with the inputs that go into Form 8949......Well, the IRS also says I CAN use a pencil to fill out my return and mail it in.  This early rounding is certainly not a requirement and makes TurboTax software customer unfriendly. In the past, TurboTax has always been precise to the penny on Form 8949 and it made the software far superior as you could quickly tie out your 1099-B/Form 8949 data. This year it is very annoying looking at my Form 8949 and see places where the result should obviously be "0" but because of this rounding I get all of these  "1s" on my return.

[capshroud]

I'm wondering what motivated such a change, performance, memory? Regardless, this is a big negative for me and should be fixed. 

[Ivan L]

This bug is a deal breaker for me. My 1099-B is like 15 pages long so imagine the discrepancy on Schedule D summary vs my actual 1099-B numbers. 

Rouding individual transactions on 8949 does NOT make any sense from user or IRS perspective. I have been a customer for past 5 years and ready to give money to someone else if TT does not address this issue ASAP. 

[JoshB1]

Add me to the list of people utterly confused by this direction - why remove precision from your software? 

[MaxTax00]

Well, at least we are the top trending discussion in the entire TurboTax Community. Maybe something will eventually get fixed...or if TT does not see it as broken then at least "improved" to how it was the last decade using TurboTax.

[vpeppen]

Quotes from different IRS publications:

“For electronic filing, the IRS requires all amounts that are transmitted individually to be rounded.”

“You can report on line 1a (for short-term transactions) or line 8a (for long-term transactions) the aggregate totals from any transactions (except sales of collectibles) for which:

You received a Form 1099-B that shows basis was reported to the IRS and doesn't show any adjustments in box 1f or 1g;

If you choose to report these transactions on lines 1a and 8a, don't report them on Form 8949. You don't need to attach a statement to explain the entries on lines 1a and 8a and, if you e-file your return, you don't need to file Form 8453.”

So, all these separate transactions on line 1a and line 8a are not transmitted with e-filing! So, they can be added on cents basis: Only the totals of proceeds, costs and gains are transmitted and, as such, only these totals should be rounded.

All other transactions still have to be reported with proceeds, cost and gain on the different 8949s and all these amounts will be rounded to the nearest dollar. So, these transactions will still result in a rounding error, which, however, should be much smaller than if all transactions would be reported on 8949s, because, normally, almost all transactions have no adjustments in box f or 1g, and are reported on line 1a or 8a, and, therefore, do not have to be transmitted with e-filing.

Here I think is where the problem lies: TurboTax seems to transmit all transactions with e-fling. Therefore all amounts, proceeds, cost, and profit, of all transactions have to be rounded with TurboTax. If they would stop transmitting the data on the individual transactions reported on line 1a and line 8a, as allowed by the IRS, they can go back to adding the 1a and 8a transactions on a cent basis before rounding and most of the rounding problem will be gone.

TurboTax suggested this solution already by stating that you could do this by entering your 1099-B manually as indicated above. You would still be able to e-file without attachments.

[mjrengaw]

@vpeppen Are their ways around this change that TT decided to implement this year, sure. But making a bunch of manual adjustments or worse, having to enter transactions manually sort of defeats the purpose of using a computer program...IMHO.

It worked perfectly well for many years until this year with this change that TT decided to make. It should never have been changed. Why make a change that fixed nothing and made TT LESS ACCURATE? Thankfully they still have a “100% accuracy guarantee “...at least we can all get our money back.

[bredman]

@vpeppen Your post does not address the other problem that I have observed and reported, and that others have also reported, namely that there are cases where individual transaction values have rounding errors, i.e., either rounded-up when they should have been rounded-down, or vice versa. That problem is definitely an arithmetical error and should be corrected.

[Geoffl10]

@WendyN2, or @ReneeM7122 ,

Would either of you be able to provide a statement as to whether this issue is in progress, under review, or rejected altogether? And if applicable, provide a time frame by which this will get resolved? This information will help me and others greatly with planning. If it won't get fixed, then I will have no choice but to file using another solution.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[capshroud]

Agreed. Does anyone know of good alternates which do not round transaction input values?

[vpeppen]

Capshroud,

According to the message boards for TaxAct and HR Block, the rounding problem for the reporting of the 1099-B transactions is the same. I even tried the "Free File Fillable Forms" from the IRS website (where you have to type in all the data yourself). It gave the same result: Every entry is rounded.

[mjrengaw]

@vpeppen @I’m honestly done trying to get TT to fix the error and go back to the way they correctly have done it for the 20+ years I have used TT. I will manually fix it and get my money back based on their “100% accurate” guarantee. Trust me, they will never admit any sort of error, even if they fix it...too many lawyers involved. As soon as they admit any sort of “error” they open themselves up to lawsuits. No large company ever voluntarily admits error anymore.

[Jonelle0]

From IRS 1040 instructions:

Rounding Off to Whole Dollars
You can round off cents to whole dollars on your return and schedules. If you do round to whole dollars,

you must round all amounts. To round, drop amounts under 50 cents and increase amounts from
50 to 99 cents to the next dollar. For example, $1.39 becomes $1 and $2.50 becomes $3.
If you have to add two or more amounts to figure the amount to enter on
a line, include cents when adding the amounts and round off only the total.
If you are entering amounts that include cents, make sure to include the
decimal point. There is no cents column on the form.

Form 8949 is NOT a schedule.  Rounding should not take place until the data is entered on  Schedule D. 

Let's keep this topic going until TT gets it right.