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Level 2
posted Mar 17, 2022 5:33:07 PM

In the popout titled "See how your numbers are adding up", does a negative "Your taxes" mean that a credit roll forward will happen?

I have a situation where I owe 22K in taxes, have 24K in solar/biomass and child advanced payment rebates, and paid 18K in.  When I click the "Federal Refund" green numbers in the top left corner, it opens up a nice explanation of my refund calculations.  I'm a bit confused by the "Your taxes" field showing roughly -2K.  I thought the solar/biomass were nonrefundable, meaning if the total rebates were below my tax liability (22K), they would roll over to the next year.  Is this because the advanced child tax payment is refundable or just treated differently, so the number can go negative?  Just for testing, I increased the solar number to a ridiculously high number, and the "your taxes" only went down by about $40. I assume there would be some indicator somewhere that a rollover would occur?

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1 Replies
Expert Alumni
Mar 17, 2022 7:26:19 PM

One of the pandemic tax changes of the last year has been to make the Child Tax Credit fully refundable IF you and the child spent a majority of the last year living in the US. See question #10 at this IRS website.

 

Your situation does open up some interesting possibilities, but I would depend only on the numbers of the tax forms themselves. 

 

Sometimes these summary pages (like Your Tax Breaks) show numbers that don't actually match what's on the return - not because they're wrong, but because the summaries are showing the total amount you entered and not the amount that ends up on the tax return.

 

As for credit rollovers, that varies from credit to credit. Some credits can be carried forward and some can't. Sometimes, if a credit is limited and amount would be carried forward, there could be a message in the TurboTax input screen at the time, but I don't know of a single place where you can see this for all credits.