"Will Trice" <wwtrice[at]paragondynamics.com> wrote:

- quote -

I had the same experience with the home office deduction
with a client of mine who later ran their numbers through
Turbo Tax. They came up with a better result than I had, so
we compared and found the same situation as described in #2.

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Will Trice wrote:

- quote -

After my original post I went through and fiddled with the
mortage interest and got it to work correctly. I may have
fat-fingered something the first (and second) times
through...

-Will

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I just completed my taxes on the Standard version of
TurboTax online (which is free if you navigate to it from
the IRS website). I ran into three bugs that I thought
would be of interest to potential users.

1. I used TT's online interview to determine if my state tax
refund from last year would be partially or fully taxable.
When I completed the interview, TT told me that it was not
taxable at all. I knew this to be incorrect, so I repeated
the interview figuring that I must have entered some piece
of data incorrectly. But as I progressed through the
interview, I did not have to change any data (it retained
the data from the first interview). Yet after the second
interview, TT told me that my state tax refund was fully
taxable (the correct answer). Yikes!

2. I have a home office and thus deduct part of my mortgage
interest on Schedule C. When TT was going through my
itemized deductions, it did not reduce my mortgage interest
deduction on Schedule A by the amount already deducted on
Schedule C (the TT interview takes you through Schedule C
first). I was able to manually correct this.
Interestingly, it did reduce other Schedule A deductions
(e.g. property tax) by the amount already deducted on
Schedule C.

3. There is no way that I can see to include amortized
refinance costs for a rental property on Form 4562 if you
file electronically. You can choose to print all your forms
and mail them in, in which case you can write in the
amortization information on the form.

I reported all of these bugs to Intuit. Interestingly,
Intuit offers an Audit Defense service toward the end of the
interview. No wonder...

Good luck with your taxes, -Will

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