Turbo tax is not showing the taxes paid on form 1099r. How do I correct this?

[cayenne98]

Rec'd form 1099R and it shows the federal taxes were taken out but when entered in turbo tax we are being taxed on the total distribution again.  Why?

[DoninGA]

Federal income taxes withheld and shown in box 4 of the Form 1099-R are entered on your tax return as a tax payment, just like from a W-2.  Reported on Form 1040 Line 64 or Form 1040A Line 40.

The taxable amount of the distribution is entered on your tax return as ordinary income and taxed at your current tax rate.  If your total tax payments are greater than your total tax liabilities then you will receive a tax refund for the overpayment.  If your total tax payments are less than your total tax liabilities then you will have taxes owed.

If you were under the age to be exempt from the 10% early withdrawal penalty, the penalty is assessed on your Form 1040 Line 59 as a tax liability.

You can view your Form 1040 at any time.  Click on Tax Tools on the left side of the screen.  Click on Tools.  Click on View Tax Summary.  Click on Preview my 1040 on the left side of the screen.

[masonmom]

It’s did this to me as well, adding an extra 30% tax and I already had them take 30% out of.  Everyone that asks the question gets the same gibberish as above and they never check their programming.  I finally switched to a different tax prep program and it finally calculated correctly.  

[nancykelley1417]

I just got off the phone with a turbo tax 'professional" named Shamika, and she was not helpful at all about this, plus she kept telling me "its up to YOU to enter the tax you paid on your 1099r" Ive already had the taxes withdrawn from my 1099r but it is not reflected anywhere on my return. The whole reason I used turbotax is to guide me through this process, and they screwed me up TWO YEARS in a row.  I really would like my fee returned, this is just plain wrong.

[DoninGA]

@nancykelley1417 Taxes withheld from W-2's and 1099's are all entered on Form 1040 Line 16.

If you completed entry of a Form 1099-R in the Retirement Plans and Social Security section of the program and there were federal taxes withheld in box 4 of the form, the program enters those on your tax return.  This is a basic function of the program and has been since the inception of the program decades ago.  If this was a systemic problem then there would hundreds of thousand of complaints and there is not.

If you are using the TurboTax online editions and have not yet filed the return then review the Form 1040.
Look at the Form 1040 Line 4a and 4b for the Form 1099-R amounts from box 1 and box 2a.  Look at Line 16 for total federal taxes withheld from W-2's and 1099's.

 Click on Tax Tools on the left side of the screen.  Click on Tools.  Click on View Tax Summary.  Click on Preview my 1040 on the left side of the screen.

[nvjarhead]

Nice try but when I've done everything but file I went and looked at my 1040 and it was completely blank. I looked at last year's last pay stub and it's showing the same as what's in my tax summary. Now that I know there is a problem here I'm going to try someone else because I don't trust this program

[AngelaJo13]

This same thing is happening to me.  I keep entering manually the amount I earned on my 1099R but Turbo Tax is not giving me credit for the federal taxes I already paid.  I feel like this is some kind of glitch in the program.  I have gone over it again and again and reviewed all of the questions but it keeps showing the total taxable amount but does not give me credit for the amount I already paid (that was withheld.)  This is for a state teacher pension plan in Illinois.  

[MarilynG1]

@AngelaJo13  The Federal Tax Withheld on your 1099-R gets added to all your other tax payments in your return. 

When all your income has been entered, and all the taxes you paid have been entered, your Tax Due is calculated using these totals.

Click this link for a more detailed explanation of Tax Withheld on Form 1099-R. 

[GaryGF]

Either this just happens in a small number of cases each year or most people never think to check it manually, after all that is why we use tax preparation s/w.  I do my sister's simple taxes each year along with my own.  Her income is 1099-R and social security.  She always has $600 taken out of her retirement, "just in case" she had taxes to pay.  Each year she gets it back, as her income is too small to pay any taxes.  This year TT said she was getting nothing back, so that was an obvious red flag.  I investigated and found that the $600 had been accepted from the input form but was never transferred to the 1040 form.  I had to do a manual override to get it to work correctly.  I would like to know which piece of s/w does this transfer between forms and what is its latest version.  TT always says it checks for s/w updates and I always install them when it says there are new ones, but I would like to check this out manually to confirm it.  As I said, this has worked fine for the past 5 years, and I am using the same computer, and still getting my download from Amazon, and then running the updates.  But it looks like some people have had this problem in the years when I did not have it.  This sounds like when I get an update from my backup s/w vendor which says that a few users with ...  have had problems backing up a particular type of file and they finally determined why it was happening.  TT needs to look into these corner case problems more seriously.

[Schwinkley]

This happened to me on my 2020 tax return.  I recorded a Form 1099-R in TurboTax (TT) Premier 2020, but the amount of federal tax shown there as withheld was not transferred to my federal 1040.  Funny because the State income withheld as shown on that same Form 1099-R was shown on my 2020 Maryland income tax return, prepared with that same TT Premier 2020 program.  I just trusted that TT would do this correctly and I filed the returns timely by the mid-April 2021 deadline.  I was not aware of the error until I received a a Notice dated March 7, 2022 from the IRS Automated Underreporter (AUR) unit that I had under-reported my federal tax payments.  I was shocked and could not figure out how this happened.  But I looked at the return and had to agree with IRS that a large federal tax withheld had not made it onto my return.  So a large federal income tax refund will be coming to me. 

I recently spent two hours or so with two different tax experts at TT (Alexa for about an hour until the call got disconnected, then another hour with Anna); they both seemed to agree that there was an error in the TT program code that caused this problem.  One of them said she would notify TT's IT department.  This mistake caused me considerable worry and anxiety and has taken up a lot of my time.  Now IRS AUR says they'll be sending me a new agreement to sign with just this overpayment of tax as the only item (they had sent others with unrelated errors made by AUR before but have corrected those).  It will still take over three more months before I get the refund.  I am very unhappy about this and I think TT should compensate people who experienced this programming error.   My trust in the accuracy of TT software has decreased.

[Critter-3]

Going forward ... NEVER file any return with any tax program or professional until you review the return for accuracy and the income/withholdings figures  are easy amounts to verify. Remember no process is 100% fool proof and if you file early in the season some of the bugs have not been worked out yet so waiting until mid March to file is always best.   Also all imported information always needs to be reviewed since disconnects happen frequently. 

[Schwinkley]

I really appreciate your message with its helpful tips.  I will be sure to check the Tax Payments on the 1040 in the future, and not just rely on having entered the 1099-R into TurboTax (TT).  I may also consider waiting until later in the filing season before I file my return.  The TT program should explicitly warn users of the software about this.  I don't recall having "imported" this 1099-R directly from the broker into TT, and likely entered the 1099-R info manually. 

But it still seems to me that when a Form 1099-R is accurately entered into TT the program should flawlessly transfer the Tax Withheld figure to the 1040.  I've used TT for years and this has never been a problem.  The programming for this should be well-established and should not need to be tweaked.  Unless gremlins invaded the computer electronics of TT, it seems hard for TT to justify having an error of this sort in the program. 

Another apparent glitch issue is that when I pull up my 2020 return, that tax withheld error has been corrected, maybe due to some software update.  But  now numbers I had on my original return on Form 8606, lines 5 through 13 are missing when I pull up the return online.  Why?  The second tax expert at TT, Anna, could not tell me.  The TT program should not "lose" parts of my return data entries (which had not been changed).  If I had to amend this return again, I'd have to fix these newfound errors, but at least no need to right now.  The TT experts told me that my problem might have come from switching between the "step-by-step" method and the "Forms" method, but I find that implausible.  I've often done that in other tax years and it has never seemed to cause any problem.

In early August 2022, I'd filed a 1040X (prepared with TT Premier 2020) to claim the refund for the previously unreported Tax Withheld on this 1099-R, and one of the tax experts told me that it gets merged into my TT return.  So I see icons for two tax returns for 2020, but only one of them says "continue."  Why show two icons when only one is operational?

Finally, I guess I probably did start working on my return too early in the filing season, that is in January 2021.  I had to notify TT then of another glitch relating to a 1099-R.  TT emailed me saying, in part:

Turbo Tax also wants to thank you for pointing out that the answer you gave on
your 1099R goes back to the default of "NO" when it should have stayed checked
"Yes" on the periodic payment question of your 1099R. I have forwarded this to
our IT department to let them know about the issue and hopefully they will resolve
the issue.  

Similarly, I noticed, when going over my 2020 return with those two tax experts that we kept on having to select answers using "radio buttons" that had already been selected before, but those selected buttons were not shown as selected.  I think it did not matter whether I saved the return or not after selecting those buttons.  TT should fix this so that the answers stay as you entered them.  

In sum, there seems to be a lot of "glitches" in the TT Premier 2020 program.  I hope TT fixes all of these.

[GaryGF]

I understand what Critter-3 is saying, but I don't think it is very practical.  In my early years I did my taxes on the paper forms, partly because I didn't want anyone else's errors getting into my tax forms.  But once I had more money coming in and I got into the stock market and bought a second house that I used as a rental, the complexities of the tax code went way beyond my capabilities.  I had to get help and I chose TT.  For many years it has served me fairly well.  But lately they seem to be getting sloppy with the basics.  In this I am in agreement with Schwinkley.  TT loves to say how accurate they are, but I don't think they back it with a guarantee to pay any penalties that occur due to errors in their code, or do they?  If we cannot trust them with the basic calculations, ones that are so blatant, that as I said previously, I caught it on a very simply tax return; then how can we trust them with the calculations that we have no idea what the results should be?  TT had better up its game going forward because there are other tax preparation s/w systems out there, and also 97,000 more IRS agents.

[VolvoGirl]

Huh?  You still need to check it over before you file.   Especially if you imported any forms.  And if you manually entered it.   Most errors are probably user errors.  

Turbo Tax is a self prepared return.  It has no way of knowing or checking that you entered something wrong or in the wrong place or entered something twice  Or left something out.  It doesn't check against any outside sources.  The IRS has copies of all the W2s and 1099s your employer and banks/brokers, etc. sent in to match against.  Turbo Tax only checks the calculations of what you entered.   It is your responsibility to check it over before you file.  They only Guarantee that the calculations are right based on the entries you made.

https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/charges-and-fees/help/what-is-the-turbotax-100-accurate-calculatio...

[Schwinkley]

Hi Volvo Girl,

Thanks for your message.  I take your points as basically valid.  In this particular "glitch" I think there is maybe a 10% chance that I made a data input error.  But in many years of using TT, this has never happened before and I think there is a 90% chance that TT software produced this particular error.  My notes indicate that I recorded this 1099-R in TT.  I've done this kind of data input the same way for years.  So although I don't know how this error came about, I think there is a good chance that the software or transmission of data (and not my data input) caused the error.