TurboTax changes some entered numbers, e.g. foreign currency exchange rate of 1.092 > 1,092.0000

[Jileha]

Hi!

I'am doing my 2023 tax return as an expat living in Europe. I have to declare 2 European bank accounts (Form 8938) and provide the applied foreign currency exchange rate. (The form was flagged as containing errors, however the error is on the additional page for the second bank account, where no information re applied foreign currency exchange rate was entered - and I am unable to enter anything manually. Another problem.) Although not marked as an error, the field with the exchange rate has changed from the entered number of 1.092 to 1,092.0000. I cannot fix it.

A similar error occurred in Form 1099-DIV in 7d, where the automatically calculated number is 528,900,000,000.00, when the actual number is 3934.64. If I enter it manually, TT changes it back to the incorrect number.

How on earth am I supposed to get rid of these errors when I cannot manually correct them???

[SteamTrain]

Hard to know exactly, but I suspect it has either to do with common European decimal formatting, where Europeans use decimal points (periods) where the USA Software is expecting commas, and they use commas  where USA uses decimal points. 

Thus a European one thousand is 1pt000 and USA is 1comma000.

SO

1) Check number format setting on your computer. Make sure it is set to USA format while working in TurboTax.  IF it is set to EU format, your 1pt092 may certainly change to 1comma092.000   Similar issues with other forms creating total chaos.

2) Make sure you hit the period after the 1 and not the comma  (adjacent characters on the keyboard.  IF you have been in Europe fairly long, you may be used to using the reverse formatting).

That's what I suspect.....but can't know for sure.

[SteamTrain]

IF on Windows 11, go to

>Settings

>>Time & Language

>>>Language and Region

English (United States) as the Preferred Language

then set

Country or Region...........United States

and

Regional Format...............English (United States)

__________________

I think that should do it.  

Then restart TTX and see what happens with that 1.092

[Jileha]

That's a good idea since I just recently had to change my computer's language to German. It doesn't quite make sense, though, since this would mean TT did not accept the period as decimal separator, but changed the number into a number that uses the same decimal separator. And it didn't happen to any other of the many numbers I entered, it just rounded up/down as usual. It also does not explain my 528 billion dollar income...  Luckily, it seems I am not expected to pay income taxes for it!  😄 

[SteamTrain]

Yeah, there are so many subroutines in TTX...created over the years, some rewritten, some not touched, some brand new, so some of the routines may be trying to convert regional number formats, while others may not....thus, chaos. 

You may have to start over once everything has been set to USA region settings. Just guessing.