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No, you do not have to defer any self-employment tax. If you are getting an error, it could be from considering the tax deferral, but after entering more details, getting into a refund situation. This would have made you ineligible.
Go back to the interview section to correct these entries and un-trigger any deferral that you can no longer take and probably later declined. You will need to initially accept it before declining.
To do this in TurboTax, follow these steps:
Enter a temporary amount as income in the self-employment section that will result in you not having a refund.
Decline to defer any self-employment tax.
Remove the temporary income.
For more details, see TurboTax Expert @DawnC's answer here, about 2/3 down the page: Resolve Sch SE-T Max Deferral Line 18 must be entered.
I appreciate that this workaround allows me to choose not to defer my self-employment taxes, but a workaround requiring me to enter and then delete $100,000 of fake income on a product that I am paying $100 to work correctly with my correct information is foolish. I am working online and at this point I may just print out blank forms from the IRS and file for free.
Turbo Tax should own that this is a bug on their part and fix it. I should be able to enter the accurate amount in box 18 on Schedule SE and then choose whether or not this proportion of my taxes is entered on my schedule 3 line 12e. It has nothing to do with the order in which I completed the modules - the program specifically told me to wait until the deductions and credits section to address the self-employment tax deferral and I considered it in the order the deductions and credits were addressed by Turbo Tax.
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