RMD after Death Reported under Decedent’s SSN

[qollzem]

Greetings. My father died in Oct. 2023. He had an IRA with NO designated beneficiary. Later in the year, before we had reported his death to the IRA custodian, the custodian auto-paid the annual RMD. We, the executors, deposited the payment in the estate account. The 1099-R for this payment shows my father’s SSN.

I assume that we should:

1. report the income on my father’s final (2023) 1040
2. subtract the same amount from the 1040 and label the subtraction “Nominee Distribution”
3. file a 1099 showing a transfer of the amount from my father’s SSN to the estate’s TIN
4. report the income on the estate’s 1041

If that is correct, how do I perform the subtraction in TurboTax when preparing my father’s final 1040? I see how to designate interest and dividends as nominee distributions but not 1099-R payouts.

Thank you for any advice.

[dmertz · Accepted solution]

Upon your father's death, in this case the IRA automatically became maintained for the benefit of the default beneficiary, usually the estate of the decedent, so the income belongs to the estate.  You should ask the IRA custodian to correct the Form 1099-R issued to your father to indicate that $0 was distributed to your father and issue an original Form 1099-R with code 4 to report the distribution as having been made to your father's estate.  If the custodian declines to make the correction, yes, the technically correct thing to do would be to report the income on your father's 2023 tax return and nominee that income to your father's estate, removing it from AGI on your father's tax return.  However, the IRS would probably not notice if you happened to leave the income as taxable on your father's 2023 tax return and not nominee the income.

TurboTax has built-in provisions for nomineeing income from some types of Forms 1099, but not Form 1099-R.  You would have to do this manually by entering a negative amount of Other taxable income equal to the taxable amount of this distribution included on Form 1040 line 4b.