Should I say Yes or No to the RMD question on standard retirement income (reported on form 1099R)? Does a regular retirement pension plan have an RMD?

[Vanessa]

You can click No to the RMD question.   No, a regular retirement pension plan does not have an RMD.  

[dmertz]

Since pension payments are not eligible for rollover anyway, it doesn't matter how you answer this question.  However, under the law, your pension distributions do constitute required distributions, so it's generally better to answer Yes and indicate that the entire distribution is RMD so that TurboTax will not permit you to report any of the pension payments as having been rolled over to another qualified retirement account.

[deelane0828]

Thank you.  It is the California Personnel Retirement Plan, and I thought that it might be the case.  "YES" is the only way to prevent Turbo-Tax from providing a way to recover the extra 50% tax, which I have never heard of, so I wanted to say "YES".  My husband wants to say "NO". Down with Turbo-Tax!

[dmertz]

I'm not sure what you mean by "recover the extra 50% tax."  TurboTax asks two different RMD questions for different purposes.  My comment refers to the immediate RMD question that TurboTax asks for each individual Form 1099-R entered where TurboTax is trying to determine the amount of the distribution that is eligible for rollover, and no part of the regular pension payments to you is eligible for rollover.  If you are instead referring to the question that appears after clicking the Continue button on the Your 1099-R Entries page and asks if you satisfied all of your RMDs (for the purpose of calculating an excess-accumulation penalty on Form 5329 Part IX), I would probably not include anything related a late pension or annuity payments in response to that question.  Pension and annuities that make periodic payments do not have a year-end balance on which to calculate a non-periodic RMD amount, so there's really no way to properly include them on Form 5329 Part IX, so there is probably no need to request a penalty waiver for having received a regular pension payment late.

Keep in mind, "pension" generally refers to regular periodic payments received for life, essentially the same as a qualified annuity.  Any portion of a retirement plans that permits non-periodic distributions (other than a pension buy-out) would not be referred to as a pension plan and certainly is subject to RMDs calculated on the previous year's year-end balance and the age of the participant.