Well, I feel stupid. I have been waiting for form 1116 since Turbotax said that it wasnt available to finish my taxes. So out of curiosity (see my prior post), I purchased H&R Block Premium at half the price and went ahead and redid my taxes to compare the 2 products. Two things of note: 1) H&R Block, compared to 10 years ago when I did my last comparison, has almost completely caught up with Turbotax in terms of the complexity of issues it can handle. For my tax return, it dealt with all the issues except 1: combining QBI of separate business entities, which Turbotax can handle and block cannot. 2) It takes a different approach than turbotax, which I like. Turbotax takes a black box approach to your taxes - you enter in the info it asks for and spits out the results (forms). H&R Block tries to explain along the way what the impact of the info you are entering and displays the forms at the same time so that you see how your answers affect the form. I like this approach better.
So when I got to Foreign Tax form 1116, I realized that I had ZERO foreign tax paid this year! The reason why turbotax flagged needing form 1116 I suspect is that it started with the import of my last year's form that had foreign tax paid and waited until the form was available to edit the info!!! LOL!
Turbotax does a better job figuring out tax payment penalties and QBI. H&R Block did a better job explaining what is going on so I can cross check the info entered. Bottom line - if I had a simpler return, I would go with H&R Block, but right now, I will have to stick with Turbotax and check out Block in 5 years time. By that time, the situation may be reversed. Now all I have to do is reconcile why the 2 programs give me different results by about a hundred bucks and then I can file!
