TurboTax will help you find out how much credit is available and how much you can use.
The Prior-Year Minimum Tax Credit lets you get back money you paid as an Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in a prior year. You can only claim this credit in a year when you don’t have to pay AMT. You can’t use the credit to reduce your AMT liability in the future. However, you can carry over any unused portion of the credit to future years.
Use Form 8801: Credit for Prior Year Minimum Tax for these purposes:
- To calculate the credit
- To calculate the amount you can carry over to future years
- If you had an AMT liability for something other than an exclusionary item
- If you had a timing issue item or deferral item
Deferral items include:
- Depreciation
- Incentive stock options exercised and not sold
- AMT credit amount to carry over
- Unallowed nonconventional source fuel credit
- Qualified electric vehicle credit
To learn more, see Form 8801 at www.irs.gov.
Generally, this means you need to have paid AMT as a result of exercising an incentive stock option or because of other items that you could've postponed paying taxes on until later, such as an AMT adjustment relating to accelerated depreciation.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8801.pdf
