Urgently Need help with California CA 540 form - I can't manually edit line 78 for "Claim of Right"

[user82936234]

I am using TurboTax CD/Download edition. I have successfully edited the federal forms to include the IRC 341 line to include the credit amount of taxes using the "Claim of Right" procedure. 

However, I am UNABLE to edit the field on the CA 540 form in TurboTax. Why are the fields blocked and how can I work around this? I need to fill in a few days before the extended deadline. Please help!

I referenced this article: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2020/2020-540-booklet.html

I need to be able to edit the value in Line 78 of the form and include the "IRC 1341" text. I don't think it's possible in the software to add the "IRC 1341" text, as there is no field for that, but there is a field for the value. But I cannot change this. How are we supposed to be able to edit this manually? That's the reason why I bought the CD/Download version, so that I can edit these fields. 

Can someone please help...thanks!

[user82936234]

I did a bit more digging. I still can't figure out a way to edit the line 78 in the manual form editor. However, I found another way to get the number in there.

The CA 540 tax instruction book clearly says to add the "claim of right" credit amount on line 78 of form 540, however, you can't edit this in Turbotax. However, I found that I could enter a value in the "Tax Pymt wks" worksheet, on line 6, "Overpayment from Previous year applied to current year".

By adding the value on this line, it will then add it into line 72 on form 540. The credit amount then ends up in the calculation on line 78, however, I don't know if this will cause an issue when being reviewed by the tax authorities. It has the same result/impact if I were to just add it into line 78. When I added the credit amount to line 6 in the Tax Pymt Worksheet, I was able to enter a description. I included the text "IRC 1341 Bonus Repayment".

This is the only way I have found that I can include this. Is this the way to do it, or is this the recommended workaround to do it? If anyone knows a better way to do this (or the correct way) I would greatly appreciate the advice.

[user82936234]

I finally figured this out. This is really bad user experience in the desktop application. Double clicking into a field should allow you to override that field's content. It was not obvious, but here is the solution. I removed the edits I made to that worksheet, as that was not the appropriate way to do it. And I did this because I figured out how to edit the field. 

So you click into the field first. You will notice you can't change anything (unlike other fields, hence the confusion). Then go to the menu bar and click on "Edit" then click on "override". You can then enter whatever number you want. But in fact, there are two fields to the left of the total, which are not obvious. Essentially the area you see the "..." text. Click somewhere in there, and you will be in an edit field. The far left box, is where you will enter the text "IRC 1341". To the right of that box (NOT THE TOTAL VALUE BOX), you can enter text (only numbers). This is where you enter the amount of the claim to right credit. Once you enter it into this field, you will then see that the value in line 78 will now include that credit amount in the total. 

So to recap, you won't override the total amount in line 78, but you need to click that field to do the Edit -> Override setting so that you can then click into the two fields to the left of that total field. 

Then you can exit out of the Form view and you will see your total credit amount has increased by the amount of the Claim of Right credit. 

Good luck!