I doubt you will believe the amount of effort I have expended in trying to get TurboTax to address the issue on line 8a.
If you are interested I could cut and paste most of the correspondence here.
I went from frustrated to way beyond that.
As time went on in this process I started to play around with fictitious returns similar to what you created. I would hand enter the data and I determined the errors have nothing to do with the fact of whether the data is imported or hand entered.
I also sent them an image of one of the fictitious returns by providing them the token to retrieve it.
I found their response to this return to be unbelievable.
"Our TurboTax Team has examined the mock file you provided, but our investigation process necessitates original information from customer software and data issues."
I found out later in a telephone call what they were even trying to say in their reply.
I determined I can recreate errors of various magnitudes depending on the amounts entered for the Taxpayer or Spouse.
The largest of the errors I discovered has the following from: Enter a dividend owned by the Spouse with a government obligation of for instance $4k, call it Company 1.
Enter a second dividend with a government obligation of for instance $200 owned by the Taxpayer, call it Company 2.
Enter additional dividends that have no government obligation from Company 3, then 4, then 5, then 6 owned by the Taxpayer. The amounts or the ordinary dividends are immaterial for Company's. 3-6. I used $100.
The program multiplies the Spouse's amount by the number of institutions on the 1099DIV list(6).
Line 8a Spouse on the Mo form will now contain the $4000 multiplied by the number of financial institutions on the list. So $4000 x 6= $24000. The Taxpayer column will be $0.
You play with the magnitudes of the Spouse by just editing the 1099 -DIV forms directly in the forms mode, this way you can quickly test various magnitudes. This allows you to see what the formula is doing in this configuration, as nonsensical as it is.
If you manually replace the $4000 owned by the Spouse on the 1099-DIV with $50 and change the Taxpayer amount to $1000 on their 1099-DIV. Then you see the following result:
$50 x 6=$300 in the Spouse's column. In the Taxpayer column you see $1000 - the $250= $750. The $250 is the difference between $300 and the $50 that should be in the Spouse's column.
This is why the errors cancel out in many scenarios, because the overage from the incorrect multiplication amount in the Spouse's column is being subtracted in the Taxpayer column.
However, it fails to cancel if the subtraction of the overage results in a negative number for the Taxpayer column. I imagine that the program probably has bounds set on every field entry, this one is clearly 0. At least that makes sense, since you can't get a check for a negative amount.
So when the Spouse's erroneous multiplier cannot be subtracted in full from the Taxpayer column it is limited to 0.
You can increase your deductions to any multiplier you wish by just adding a financial institutions to the list.
The key to this is that they all must be owned by the Taxpayer not the Spouse or it resets, the multiplier stops at that point the ownership belongs to the Spouse after the initial Taxpayer amount is entered.
The error is not symmetrical. If your reverse everything in my example by changing Spouse to Taxpayer and Taxpayer to Spouse, then the amounts are all correct on 8a.
I have still been unable to get the Office of the President to pass this case to the development team. That is where the whole chain of emails and phone calls some in.
I thought you might be interested in seeing what I uncovered, and what happens if as a user you are unwilling to provide your actual tax file what it takes to get them to address an error.
Regards,
Glenn
