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Level 2
posted Feb 21, 2021 9:20:53 AM

TurboTax Premier: 1099B entering cost basis from 0 to actual amount increased Fed Tax, putting back to 0, increased Fed Tax even more!

I am in the process of preparing 2020 Tax Return in TurboTax Premier on Mac.

 

The last thing I did was import my ETrade 1099Bs.

My fed tax due increased 4x which is not unreasonable as I sold individual stocks as well as some company benefit stock due to Covid, as well as the following issue...

 

Etrade does not enter a cost basis for the company stock sold. So I need to use the "getSupplementaryInformation" for those sales to enter the cost basis.

 

I chose the largest sale, and entered the cost basis expecting the fed tax to go down. I clicked "Next" and it actually went up slightly.

 

So I thought that seems weird. Let's start over. So I hit the back button, and changed the value back to 0, and hit Next, this time the fed tax went up a lot, like 50% increase. So I completely backed out of the form entry and quit the app, with it still showing the 50% increase in fed tax.

 

I relaunched and it still shows the 50% increase.

 

This seems like a bug and that I cannot trust whatever calculations are going on inside TurboTax.

 

I'm now thinking that it might be worth paying another $50 or whatever for a competing product so that I have two sources to compare what is going on.

 

 

 

 

 

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2 Replies
Expert Alumni
Feb 24, 2021 11:28:04 AM

 As you indicated this will create a positive overall income adjustment which is not what you want.  There are a couple of options (no pun intended), that you might try that should eliminate this experience. 

 

These particular steps may provide the ability to post a negative value to form 1099-B, Box 1d.

  1. Select the option for a 1099-B
  2. Select to type it myself
  3. Enter Bank
  4. I'll enter one sale at a time
  5. Enter the stock data and leave 10d BLANK
  6. When you hit Continue you will get a RED error message
  7. At the bottom of the screen select Allow me to continue with incomplete information  > Continue
  8. Any less common items will be blank.  Select Done
  9. No this is not employee stock
  10. Select the last item An adjustment is required for reasons not already covered.
  11. Enter the negative number that you had in Box 1d. 
  12. This will complete the transaction 

Another option is to put $1 in the proceeds box and then add that $1 to the negative gross proceeds as your cost basis (positive figure). This will provide the accurate results of income and tax.  The most important thing is the correct end results on the tax return.

Level 2
Feb 26, 2021 11:01:42 AM

I have not tried the reply but it is not addressing the real topic.

 

the point is that I entered a number from a previous value, then reverted that change. Yet my taxes owed are now 50% more even though the state of the data was reverted. That does not make sense.

 

I imported the data because it is way too much to enter manually. And again the point of the issue is how the software behaves for the given data.