TT is capping my *2020* charitable contributions at 60% of MAGI; shouldn't it be 100%? I wonder if my charitable carryover from 2018-19 could be messing it up somehow?

[roy-in-tampa]

Talked to an TT customer service agent, but we got cut off. I'm itemizing, married filing jointly, all my charitable contributions are cash, and don't fall under any of the "30%" categories.

My 2020 charitable cash contributions are 79% of my 2020 AGI (which is under $400k), but TT is limiting the contributions to exactly 60% of AGI.

[Opus 17]

Are your contributions in money, or items, stocks, or other types of donations.? The special 100% limit for 2020 only applies to monetary donations  (cash, check, or credit card).

[Opus 17 · Accepted solution]

You probably need to get back on the phone with an agent. If this is a program bug, it’s going to be practically impossible to diagnose it in this forum. When using TurboTax online, you are not allowed to view or edit the programs‘s internal worksheets or calculations.  A customer support agent may be able to help you with that. If you switched to using the desktop version installed on your own computer, you would have access to view the forms and calculations and it would be easier to troubleshoot.

According to the 2019 version of IRS publication 526 which discusses charitable contributions, carryovers are subject to the same percentage limits when they are used as applied in the year of the original donation.  However, the publication 526 also says that you were supposed to apply current charitable donations first, and then use any available carryovers. That should mean that you would fully deduct your cash contributions for 2020 and then could not use any of your carryover because you have already exceeded the 60% limit that applied in 2019.  The IRS has not released the 2020 version of publication 526, so it is possible that the rules have been modified or the calculation has been changed because of the temporary increase in the charity donation limit.

Here is the link to the unofficial draft version of publication 526 for 2020.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/p526--dft.pdf

You can try and do the worksheet yourself and see what you come up with, but as I said, because you are using TurboTax online, you can’t access the internal program worksheet to compare it.

[roy-in-tampa]

Good advice, thanks. Your thinking about order of applying current year vs. carryover contributions lines up with mine. I'll try customer service again.

[pannbeck22]

I'm having the same issue with a 60% cap for charitable deductions for 2020 and I do not have any carryover. 

I believe it is a bug that needs to be corrected since the help screens still reference a 60% limit.

I posted the issue to TurboTax Facebook.  Here is the posting and response.

Post:  There is still an error is Schedule A line 14. It is limiting cash charitable deductions to 60% of AGI and there should be no limitation for 2020 due to CARES act. Also same error is in help doc for that form.

Response: Hello there, thank you for reaching out to us. Thank you for the information. We are working to fix this issue, and accommodate the new changes within the system. - Kayla

[roy-in-tampa]

Thanks for the response. Yeah, I was on the phone with them the other day, and they admitted it was an error that they hope to resolve quickly.