Massachusetts, Schedule B, line 13b need help to adjust

[mightyPika]

Hi,

I'm working on a Part-Year Massachusetts tax return (1-NR/PY) and I'm struggling to get correct value for short-term capital gains.

I'm looking onto Mass return Schedule B line 10 (Massachusetts short-term capital gains) the value is $1000. This value comes from Federal Return Schedule D, and this is the correct value for the whole year.

However, a portion of these $1000 were gained while I was a partial resident of Oregon, and taxes are paid to Oregon thru Oregon tax return.

According to the instruction (https://www.mass.gov/doc/2024-form-1-nrpy-instructions/download), I should use line 13b to make an adjustment - "Line 13b. Part-Year/Nonresidents only. Part-year residents, enter the amount of gain transactions included in lines 10 and 12 conducted while you were domiciled in another state or country that were not associated with a trade or business in Massachusetts, not less than 0;"

But line 13b is not editable directly in the Form view. And so far I failed to find where/what should i do in order this value to be adjusted. Appreciate any guidance here.

I had similar issue with Dividends/Interest and Long-term capital gains, but I found the right fields in the form to adjust them according to Oregon/Mass distribution.

[mightyPika]

Rant.

I called phone support and we spent 1.5hr on this issue. We went thru all the MA and OR questions again (assuming I missed the question which allows to specify how much short-term capital gains should be attributed to MA), but failed to find it.

Agent asked multiple times to verify if my Windows is updated. In the end Agent was out of ideas and suggested me to restart Turbotax tomorrow and see if it updates and maybe my issue will be resolved. That suggestion made me speechless for a moment.

After I've been pushing back, agent agreed to check with his supervisor if this is an on-going issue and they might have answer to that question in a week. Agent refused to escalate this issue further, despite together we failed to find how this could be a user error and it appears to be Turbotax error.

All tools have issues, that's ok. But how company manages these issues is what matters. In this case Turbotax failed completely. I do not remember when I had such a poor experience with support. I've been using Turbotax for the last 10 years, this year is the last one I use it.

Solution.

Staring at the same forms again I discovered that any field in the form (even non-editable by default) actually can be edited with a Right-Mouse-Click  => Override.

MA Schedule B line 13b is calculated based on [Capital Gains/Losses Worksheet] lines 8 and 9. Line 8 have no Data Source, so I'm assuming this is the one which should be the original source of the data.

So put my Non-MA portion of short-term gains here, it was propagated to Schedule B line 13b and now my taxes are aligned my estimations.

[crash345u]

It seems TT has a lot of problems dealing with Part Time MA returns. I had a nightmare last year trying to properly allocate excluded dividends for US Government Obligations on the MA return between two states. I also spent over an hour on the phone with support who agreed there was a problem but could not fix it.

The other state was fine but the software was broken for MA. I ended up having to get a refund for the TT S/W and filed with another tax program. Unfortunately for TT,  I got a taste for much less expensive  s/w that actually worked and I had been using TT since the early 2000's.

Glad you figured it out.

[mightyPika]

I'm glad there there was someone in TT architect/design team who predicted that TT will never be bug free and decided to give user an Override tool.

I'm surprised support didn't not suggest it to me, as it's clear what needs to be done, just TT interface does not allow it (unless user use Override).

What tool did you went with as a replacement? Do you like it?

[crash345u]

I have used  FreetaxUSA and OLT software both with excellent results. They are not as  refined as TT (less clean user menus, less detailed supplemental worksheets, less guidance in the help menus)  but much cheaper and work fine especially if you are comfortable doing your own taxes.   TT is a Lexus, the others are Toyotas. 

I used the online version of TT which had no such capability to override form data. I had so much trouble running the TT desktop SW years past on my computers I switched to Online which is less flexible but no more computer problems.