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Full time students not being identified as dependents

Why does the "is this person a dependent" form no longer ask about whether they were a full time student or not up front? In previous years, that, along with questions about who their guardians are and whether they lived with you the entire year, were asked first. Now, it's not asked until the very last page, and even then it's just a checkbox in the list of things that usually don't apply to most people, like "was this person incarcerated".

Because that first page does not know their student status, it asks for their income (which it's never asked me before) and because I missed the checkbox the first time through, it was initially telling me that neither of my college-age children were dependents. At first I thought some IRS rule change meant we were no long able to claim our very much dependent children, but after researching and confirming what the rules are, I went  back through the form trying to figure it out and spotted the checkbox. Then for each child after checking that, the entire form was flagged as "needs review" again, so I went through it all yet again and this time it correctly did not ask about their income and identified them as dependents.

I imagine this is tripping a lot of people up right now. Whether they were a student or not is one of the main things used to determine their dependent status, so it should be asked first. And then income is irrelevant so it shouldn't even ask that.


Also, the "AI Assistant" is garbage. I asked it "How do I report a bug in TurboTax?" and it said to go to the support page for the product and look for a section about how to report a bug. Well, gee, I never would have thought of that, only there is no such section or anywhere to do such a thing. Clearly a generic answer about how to report bugs in general, not specific to TurboTax. If you're not going to train it with information relevant to your product, why bother?

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3 Replies

Full time students not being identified as dependents

We are seeing some users who are missing or skipping past a page in MY INFO that is titled "Less Common Situations"----that screen gives you a spot to click the the child was a student.  Go back through the MY INFO screens again.  Sometimes it helps to delete the child and re-enter them.

**Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to offer the most correct information possible. The poster disclaims any legal responsibility for the accuracy of the information that is contained in this post.**

Full time students not being identified as dependents

Yes that's exactly the problem. Being a full time student is definitely not a "Less common situation". And that's what I did to fix mine. But in past years this question was asked up front, not buried in a checkbox at the end. Seems like a bug that should be fixed.

Full time students not being identified as dependents

That is exactly what happened to me and I only discovered it after I filed.  Now I am going to have to do an amendment due to this very issue.  I am not sure why it changed the location of the question but it does seem very confusing.  

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