2019 California 540 Schedule CA and D Capital Gain or Loss Adjustment due to rounding

[danman]

In the past my California 540 Schedule CA entry for Capital gains always showed that there was no adjustments from the federal amounts. This year for the first time it showed a difference of $13. Also did this cause schedule D to be printed. In order to find out what caused the difference I compared the entries of schedule D with the federal Schedule D and 8949. I found that the entires are exactly the same just that TurboTax rounds the sales price and basis for each transaction on schedule D whereas it does not round them on the federal schedules. That caused the $13 difference in my case. I verified thatIn the previous year TurboTax did not round the individual transactions on California Schedule D line 1 but only the totals on the lines below (which makes much more sense).

I don't see anywhere in the California instructions for schedule D that the individual entries should be rounded this year. Is this a bug in the software that causes the rounding? I don't think that it's indented that a difference in capital gains to be listed on schedule CA that is entirely based on TurboTax rounding differently.

[AmyC]

The federal government requires that we submit everything rounded. I do not know about CA. I was able to find, 2019 Handbook for Authorized e-file Providers FTB ... and it does say CA mostly files the federal guidelines. I could not find the processing information at all.

If you feel this is an issue that needs further investigation, please submit it for review to our Accuracy Guarantee Department for investigation.

[dham949]

danman - did you ever get an answer that addresses your particular issue?  having same issue on my return;  assuming the more transaction(s) one has, the larger the adjustment could potentially be.

[w65]

I'm also having this (very annoying) issue.

Out of 4 pages of transactions there's a total difference in rounding of $2. As a result schedule D is included, the the difference is reported on schedule CA and my income is incorrectly adjusted. Worse, the difference results in an under-reported tax liability.

I do not see any way to override things as turbotax will not allow the complete removal of schedule D via an means. Further, the barcodes generated by turbotax indicate the presence of a schedule D so it's not advisable to remove it from the filing.

Why can't there be a simple question of whether the are any differences in capital gain/loss before including all this crap?

[rs88]

Me too.

For those that might be in a position to help, a fix would be to allow us to override and enter the CA540 Schedule D individual transactions as unrounded.

Note: Amy's post is partially right.  The numbers on Federal 1040 Schedule D are rounded.  But on the Federal 1040 Schedule D Form 8949 which has the detailed transactions, TurboTax does not round.

In fact, TurboTax has unrounded individual transaction numbers on California Schedule D in the "Capital Gains and Losses Smart Worksheet" but then rounds the individual transactions when moving them to Section 1 of California Schedule D.  This is what causes the discrepancy between the Federal and State numbers - the Federal rounds after calculating the totals and the State rounds each transaction individually before calculating totals.

If this doesn't get fixed my two choices are i) just file with this weird rounding discrepancy and hope that no one notices/cares or ii) take the info from TurboTax, manually transcribe to another set of forms with corrections and file manually.  But it sure would be nice to just fix this in the software.

Thanks

[rs88]

For those that are willing, the support folks did come up with a work around.  If you are using the download version (at least on a PC this works).  You can go into Forms mode and if you right click on the fields in the Calif Schedule D you can "override" the values for "Line 1 column e" to include the unrounded numbers.  You can then do the same with the "line 4" total which should then make "line 12.b." correct.  It takes a ton of work but it does work.

[Devsd]

You are right, I can override the total gain/loss to no rounding. But I still can not override sale price or cost basis, which makes gain/loss calculation off. Were you able to override sale price/cost basis as well or you left it as it is.

Thanks for your help.

[phraxos]

This is not really a solution for two reasons. First, it is impractically difficult for someone with many transactions. Second, it would void the TurboTax accuracy guarantee.

The way to fix this problem is to do rounding consistently on both the Federal and California forms.

By the way, in the past I've seen similar issues where rounding was done one way for regular tax and another way for AMT, resulting in the introduction of discrepancies in carryover amounts that build up over the years and cause innumerable headaches.

[rs88]

Devsd - I'm not positive but I think you're right, I just left the column (b) sales price and (c) cost basis as rounded and put in the unrounded column (e) result.  It looks a little funny but it is accurate.

Here's to hoping somebody at Intuit takes a look at this thread before coding up the 2020 version.