Mortgage Interest Deduction for a Coop

[ZorbaWL]

NOTE:  This not a question on standard home mortgage interest.

I have an apartment in a coop in NYC.  The coop has 900+ units.  Every person who owns an apartment is an owner of the coop.  There is a mortgage on the coop building.  Every February, all owners of the coop receive a letter from a CPA firm detailing how much mortgage interest the owners can deduct from their personal income tax.  The letter contains only the interest amount.  There is no information on origination date, mortgage amount or any other numbers that we see on a regular 1098 form, since this is not a home mortgage.  This is a mortgage for a corporation (the coop), where the interest is distributed among the owners of the corporation.

How will I be able to deduct the mortgage interest on TurboTax Premier, desktop version?

As there are many coops in NYC, and probably many of them use TurboTax (maybe not…they may use tax accounts), there must be a way I can enter the interest in TurboTax.

I used to have a tax accountant doing my taxes.  He was able to enter the interest on Schedule A, box 8b.  However, when I do this, TurboTax does not include the interest in the calculation.  (I know because I would enter a fake 1098 in the step-by-step section using the same mortgage interest and TurboTax will decrease my taxes).

[KrisD15]

Perhaps the owners of the other co-ops get a 1098 from the CPA firm that handles their bookkeeping. 

You could enter a "mock" 1098, but you would need to know your share of the loan balance. 

If the CPA Firm was able to calculate your share of the interest, they should be able to also tell you what your share of the loan balance is.

You could then enter as a 1098 into the TurboTax program and indicate that the 1098 was issued in the name of someone else, which would be the housing corporation.

According to the IRS:

"Cooperative apartment owner. If you own a cooperative apartment, you must reduce your home mortgage interest deduction by your share of any cash portion of a patronage dividend that the cooperative receives. The patronage dividend is a partial refund to the cooperative housing corporation of mortgage interest if paid in a prior year.

If you receive a Form 1098 from the cooperative housing corporation, the form should show only the amount you can deduct.

Limits on deduction. To figure how the limits discussed in Part II apply to you, treat your share of the cooperative's debt as debt incurred by you. The cooperative should determine your share of its grandfathered debt, and its home acquisition debt. (Your share of each of these types of debt is equal to the average balance of each debt multiplied by the fraction just given.) After your share of the average balance of each type of debt is determined, you include it with the average balance of that type of debt secured by your stock.

Form 1098. The cooperative should give you a Form 1098 showing your share of the interest. Use the rules in this publication to determine your deductible mortgage interest."

[ZorbaWL]

The CPA firm actually does not calculate the interest for every unit in the coop.  They send out a standard letter to every owner of the coop.  Each owner has a number of shares of the coop, similar to stocks in a company.  The shares are determined by the size of the apartment and its location (higher floors has more shares).  The standard CPA letter provides the interest for 1 share.  Then each owner can multiply the number shares for the apartment by this number to get the interest.  No one in the coop gets a 1098 form from the CPA firm.

I've used TaxSlayer in previous years and was able to enter the interest in their software.  However, I am unable to find where I can enter it in TurboTax.  Then, of course, the tax account was also able to do this in whatever software he was using.