I arrived in Afghanistan as a contractor on March 1, 2019. I took the foreign tax exclusion for Tax Year 2019 when I filed my 2019 return in March of 2020 for the period of 03/01/2019 - 02/29/2020.
I was planning on staying in Afghanistan through 2020 and some of 2021, enough to meet the foreign tax exclusion for Tax Year 2020.
Contractors/Civilians were advised in March that if they had underlying health issues then they should leave country as the military bases did not have the standard of care to provide if anybody at risk were to come down with COVID. Since I had an underlying condition, I left country on 05/25/2020.
If I understand it correctly, the COVID-19 Emergency Relief provides a waiver to allow qualified individuals to exclude foreign earned income that I believe I am entitled to since I left between 02/01/2020 - 07/15/2020 and had the expectation that I would have otherwise qualified under the Physical Presence Test.
My question is to what put down on the 2555 form for the Qualifying 12 Month Period? Do I put the 12 month period beginning as 03/01/2020 - 02/28/2021 (with an arrival date in country as 03/01/2019) as this is when I reasonably expected to be there?
Basically, what happens when I don't put a full 365 days in this field (i.e. 03/01/2020 - 05/25/2020), TurboTax rejects it and says it needs to be fixed and should have 365 days in these blocks.
