Under the foreign income tax exclusion section for trips to the US, I am getting an error if I enter "0" for the number of days in the US for business.

[taxmonkey08]

When entering information about a vacation to the US for personal reasons, not business, I enter the length of the stay in the US in days as "9". Then, it asks how many days were for business and I get an error when I put "0", even though the trip was NOT for business. I believe this is an error in TurboTax that needs to be corrected and I should not have to pay for help.

[KarenJ · Accepted solution]

Please try leaving the field "blank" when it asks if you had any US workdays.

[taxmonkey08]

That worked. Thanks!

[pmalone10]

Hi - I had the same problem, and left that answer blank, so it let me finish. However, at the end of the process, when TurboTax was reviewing my tax returns, it says that my federal return "needs review" and it takes me to that section on the 2555-T form to put a number for "number of days in US on business" for the four trips I made in the 2018 tax year. The correct answer for all 4 is "0". Do I also leave this blank, and continue to process the form as is?

[KarenJ]

Yes leave it blank..  Please let me know if it prevents you from e-filing.

[rchasan]

I have the same problem and in Smart Check it does not allow me to continue.

[pmalone10]

I just figured it out myself. Put the income earned in the US to blank, and it should let you continue and file.

[rchasan]

Eventually I exited the program and rentered the data and it allowed me to ignore the field.  This is for sure a flaw in the program.

[diemartin]

A Software that behaves differenly depending on " " or "0" for income is scary.

[pk]

Agreed , Ideally it should treat zero as zero  and blank as no entry or zero for purposes of computation .

[jackhstill]

In order to successfully e-file, I had to keep both "number of days" and "income earned" BLANK.  This seems like a bug.  TurboTax should accept "0" as a valid value.