Shame on you TurboTax! Your negligence to fix this VA military benefit issue for years cost me about $7K

[fe7565]

Either I am a blind or I am one of the dumbest retired USAF Chiefs ever using TurboTax (for over a decade).. TurboTax missed nagging me (or even hinting) at the $20K (in tax year 2022), $30K (tax year 2023), $40K (tax year 2024), $40K (tax year 2025) Virginia military tax benefit deduction. In tax year 2025 the difference between selecting it vs not was about $2400 in my case. Going back to tax year 2024, it was $2000. Didn't even yet calculated 2023 and 2022.  (By the way, how far back can I amend my VA  tax return? 3 years like the federal?)

Apparently, I am NOT the only one amongst the hundreds of thousands of retired military living in VA who is eligible and was dumb not to know about this new VA law enacted in 2022.  Somehow I was able to stumble on it in TurboTax for the last 4 years in a row. Because "stumbling on it" is exactly how you can find it.  And I am the type who goes through every question regardless if it ever remotely may apply.

In the TurboTax Federal return the military pension is not identified as such, it's lumped in under "Financial Institution IRAs, etc" so its never flagged as "military pension" anywhere except under the name of the "Financial Institution" ...which is entered under the name "Defense Finance and Accounting Service US Military Pay" . One would think that would be enough for the TruboTax program to flag it as such fo the state taxes and give it about as much priority as claiming "VA bond" exemption or "farm vehicle" or other trivial deductions used by a total of 5 people in the state of Virginia.

https://www.tax.virginia.gov/military-benefits-faq

[AmyC]

Here are the rules for filing a VA amended return, basically 3 years so you could file the 2022 today. Thank you for your service!

[fe7565]

Thank you. I spent all day today preparing my 2022, 2023, 2024 state amendments.  Caught the 2025 in time.  The 2022 I had to hand-jam, since my 2022 TurboTax Premier Desktop version could not be activated anymore.   Luckily, I have until 1May 2026 for the 2022. 

It's still a shame that for years now when it was first brought to the attention of TurboTax by users, this is easy to miss item was not fixed. TurboTax could have added a couple of lines of codes to the firmware to fix it. One afternoon job for a couple of programmers.   

It should be flagged during the Federal review when the user enters DFAS as the payer for the 1099-R and then checked again for applicability during the state review process.   VA is not the only state by the way with such subtractions.  

Your TurboTax product development manager should be fired for not fixing this issue for years, affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of veterans.    Your product development manager made sure that these trivial (to most) credits/subtractions are prominently reviewed by the user (motion picture production, commercial watermen equipment, specialized spaceport equipment,  farmer's market produce, certain printed materials for out-of-state use, etc) , but not one that has  a major impact on a huge segment of the users, such as military benefits.