You may indeed have carefully itemized all of your deductions, and yet still not see them benefit you in the final review section of TurboTax, or change the amount of your tax refund (or liability). TurboTax may also display a message indicating that you didn't itemize your deductions, when in fact you've entered them into the program.
The far most common reason for this is that is a taxpayer must have enough itemized
deductions (in total) to exceed the standard deduction available to all
taxpayers, based on their filing status. Since more than 2 in 3 taxpayers do not meet this level, most people end up
taking the (more valuable) standard deduction, rather than itemizing
deductions. If you input all your data carefully, however, the TurboTax
software will make that determination for you.
For example, a couple, under age 65, and filing a return as Married Filing Jointly (in 2016), has a standard deduction of $12,600. Thus, unless this taxpayer has more than $12,600 in itemized deductions to take, after all other limitations are applied (such as the 2% Adjusted Gross Income limit that reduces tax preparation fees and miscellaneous deductions down to $0, to the extent that they don't exceed more than 2% of a taxpayer's AGI figure), then the standard deduction has more "value" to it . . . and so the TurboTax software will therefore automatically select it.
Probably, then, the phenomena that you observe is related to the processes described above. However, if you'd like us to review your data entry and diagnose your tax return further, we'd be happy to do so with you.
Therefore, if you have further
questions, or just want to speak with a live tax
expert (including the ability to
screen-share with your computer), please feel free to contact us. We
would be happy to help you (and as a paying TurboTax customer the call is free
to you). Here is a link where you can create a support ticket and reach
us:
https://support.turbotax.intuit.com/contact/
Thank you for asking this
question.
