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Underpayment Penalty for 2022

Turbo Tax calculated underpayment penalty for us. I believe that was due to unexpected salary hikes which happened 3 times during the year between me and my spouse. Those was not possible to predict.  TT is offering to annualize our income, however it does not give the instructions on how to do that. 

 

Our income last year was from 3 main sources: W2 (the largest), Interest and ESPP sale (both qualified and non-qualified and both - short term and long term). Do we have to enter ALL of it? If so, is it possible to get some more instructions on what should we be looking into our pay checks as well as how do we properly enter our 1099-B by those periods?

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Underpayment Penalty for 2022

AL107,

 

Yes, it does seem pretty lame to have to manually reenter every 1099-B transaction again separated into the time range bins according to date of sale. (Of course capital gains distributions will have to be totaled separately.) I will bring it to the attention of the powers that be, but that ain't gonna be fixed this year.  I know that the desktop versions of TurboTax allow you to look at and enter data in Forms View.  Don't know if the online version will let you do that, too.  Try digging around a bit.  If it can do so, then bring up form 8849 (the one that list the 1099-B sales transactions) and copy-paste into a spreadsheet.  This would allow you to sort and sum conveniently and just input "fake" 1099-B's for short term and for long term in each period.  These aren't printed in the tax return, they are just used to total up income per period.

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6 Replies

Underpayment Penalty for 2022

Al107,

 

As someone who has done Form 2210 calculations every quarter for decades because of income that did not come from paychecks, I believe I can assist.  But first, let me touch on the multiple paycheck withhold trap you may well have stumbled into.

 

The federal income tax is progressive, that is the percentage of tax get higher as income gets higher.  An employer is by default required to withhold at a level consistent with just the one income paid to the employee.  When the household has two coinciding paycheck incomes, the combined withholding tends to be at too low a level for the combined income of that household.  This can lead to owing taxes come April rather than receiving a refund and, in some cases like yours, to owing more than $1,000 at tax time, which triggers Form 2210.  You can use IRS Publication 15-T to look up what withholding would be applied to your combined paychecks and modify your W4 forms to add an extra amount per paycheck that causes the combined withholding to match the 15-T table lookup.  You can split the extra amount between the two paychecks if you want or just apply the total to one of them.

 

Putting this long aside aside, I advise you to pull down Form 2210 and its instructions from the IRS website.  The links are:

 

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2210.pdf

and

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i2210.pdf

 

The Annualized Income is on page 3 of the form itself.  You then take the 1040 form and go through it line by line to fill in the income you received during each of the four periods ending in March, May, August, and December and add it up to an adjusted gross income for each period.  If you are choosing to itemize your deductions, you would do the same for Schedule A entries for each period.  Both the partial AGI and partial itemized deductions are annualized by the relevant factor.  These are used to compute an annualized taxable income and a corresponding amount that would be taxed on that income.  Finally the tax computed is divided back down by the annualization factor and 90% of the number is the minimum amount of tax that needs to have been paid to avoid underpayment penalty and interest.

 

As I have my own spreadsheets that I update each month, I've actually not used the TurboTax 2210 dialogues so I don't know how much assistance it gives, but the real slog is manually looking up and sorting income and itemized expenses into the 4 periods.  Once you have that the rest is filling in the AI table entries and I hope letting TurboTax calculate the rest of the table.

 

Okay, now for 2023 and beyond, estimated tax payments based on prior year income are an easy way to avoid running afoul of the Form 2210 underpayment trap.  The 2210 instructions tell you how much the minimum amount to have to add beyond payroll withholding  via estimated tax payments to reach 25% of of your prior year tax (or 110% of that if the prior year income was $150K or more.)

 

Finally, don't forget about state tax as well if you live in a state that has an income tax.  The same procedure applies (using state rules) and the safe harbor percentages can be different.

 

Underpayment Penalty for 2022

Thanks a lot @hbl3973 for taking time and provide such an extensive response! Really appreciate your help on this one?

 

I know that I can enter the income using my paychecks and bank statements for interest, but I'm a bit clueless on how to properly enter my 1099-B for each period. My 1099-B has all sorts of ESPP types: qualified, non qualified with different terms and cost basis calculations. Do you happen to know how to enter that?

 

Turbo Tax handles ESPP nicely through the interview, but I felt like they sort of dropped the ball big time when it comes to annualizing income. Not sure why they ask customers to enter 1099-B manually when they do have that information - 1099-B has the dates of sales, type of stocks and their terms (long or short). I'm just not sure how to handle this part properly.

 

Thanks again for helping me!

Underpayment Penalty for 2022

AL107,

 

Yes, it does seem pretty lame to have to manually reenter every 1099-B transaction again separated into the time range bins according to date of sale. (Of course capital gains distributions will have to be totaled separately.) I will bring it to the attention of the powers that be, but that ain't gonna be fixed this year.  I know that the desktop versions of TurboTax allow you to look at and enter data in Forms View.  Don't know if the online version will let you do that, too.  Try digging around a bit.  If it can do so, then bring up form 8849 (the one that list the 1099-B sales transactions) and copy-paste into a spreadsheet.  This would allow you to sort and sum conveniently and just input "fake" 1099-B's for short term and for long term in each period.  These aren't printed in the tax return, they are just used to total up income per period.

Underpayment Penalty for 2022

AL107,

I dug around and found that the online version of TurboTax does not let you view individual forms.  Sigh.

 

I did find a few options, none of which I've tried.

 

(1) https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/tax-forms/find-forms-mode/L507Cr4T5_US_e... 

tells how one can transfer from online to a CD/download product.  You need to be sure you are purchasing the level of the product you need.   

(2) You can go through into the online efile step, pay the fee, and then bring up a PDF of your return from which you would scrape the 8849 information and paste into a spreadsheet.  You can then go back to your return and make changes before coming back to the efile step.

(3) You can opt to efile without Form 2210, saving the PDF of the return for scraping, and later amend it should your calculations show it would reduce your tax bill.  This effectively mirrors the second option but gives you up to 3 years in which to tackle the income split at leisure.

Underpayment Penalty for 2022

Thanks again @hbl3973 for helping me with this. I was able to get to the forms by paying TurboTax Online fee first. After that I was able to reduce the underpayment penalty (believe it or not) to just $3 .... But it was not great experience. This portion is clearly being overlooked by TurboTax. 

 

Thanks a lot for helping me again!

Underpayment Penalty for 2022

Glad you got it accomplished!  Let's trust that 2023 proves less troublesome.  At least TurboTax is considering your very reasonable suggestion for next year.

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