Turbo Tax imported some wrong estimated tax payment data for me from Quicken.
After starting a new return, I was invited to import data from Quicken and did so.
It imported estimated tax payments made between Jan. 2005 and Dec.
2005.
This is wrong, because the Jan. 2005 payment was for the 2004 tax year, and it missed the Jan. 2006 payment which needs to be in this return for the 2005 tax year.
Is this a known bug in Turbo Tax? Obviously it could lead to making incorrect tax payments if the user doesn't catch the problem.
Using TT 2005 Deluxe, and just 'upgraded' to Quicken Premier H&B 2006.
My impression, FWIW, is that QW and TTax are both looking within a date range for transactions; e.g., for TxYr 2005 they are looking within the range 1/1/05 to 12/31/05 exclusively. Transactions outside of that range are ignored - such as an estimated tax payment for 05 made in Jan
The sophistication to recognize the Jan 06 payment as a 05 tax related transaction simply isn't there [yet????].
I have a somewhat analogus situation where investment income is posted to my accounts in Jan 06 or later but is reported as taxable for 05 per the 1099's. My work-around is to change the transaction date for these to 12/31/05 and make a note of the actual posting date in the memo field. Not elegant and it screws up the month end balances - but I can generate accurate Tax Schedule Reports which is a high priority for me.
Thus, for your situation, I would probably date the Jan 06 payment
12/31/05 to force it into TY 2005 for tax reporting purposes [and then try to remember why my month-end balances don't match up-arrgh!!].
If the point of the reports is to export to Turbo Tax, then you could establish a separate category for, e.g., "previous year dividend income" with the same linked tax form line - and then do a second export on those categories using the current year.
My solution has been to just enter whatever the numbers are on the
1099s (which is a lot easier with the FIs that support Turbo Tax download). Those are the numbers the IRS will believe anyway, and if your return has anything different you will get a nasty letter from the IRS computer. So why fight it?
(The only thing is to be sure to remember to create basis adjustment transactions in Quicken from the 1099-OID detail, or you'll pay tax twice on that. I've posted on this in previous years.)
I can handle my situation because I go through the return and eyeball the important things like the tax payments.
What terrifies me is that a lot of people probably just do a TTax import from Quicken and send the return on in, and pay the wrong amount of tax.
I was bothered for years by Quicken's mishandling of capital gains basis dates, which Intuit only fixed (well, mostly fixed) after I got a famous software columnist to ask their PR people about it. I am flabbergasted by how little Intuit cares about getting the numbers right, even though they are playing with billions of dollars of their customers' real money.
That's why I was surprised that Turbo Tax doesn't do the estimated tax payment allocation better, or at least ask the user to do it, rather than making what is almost guaranteed to be the wrong assumption.
What is the faulty assumption you refer to in the estimated payments section in TTax?
What are the bugs in the basis dates? I vaguely remember having to deal with one, but no longer can remember what it was.
I would sooner slit my throat than import Quicken into TTAX. I don't know why it's even advertised except that one would think the two products, coming from the same company, would work well together, wouldn't you? Poor souls that think that either program can be used without great care, and usually a more than modest understanding of the tax code. The final estimated tax payment problem has been a pain for years.
The one we've been discussing, in my original post above - the assumption that the estimated tax payment January 15 applies to the current year, when in fact it is for the prior one.
Maybe because we don't have to deal with it any more. It was fixed in Quicken 2001, except for spinoffs which was almost fixed in 2002. The bug migrated from bad basis dates to bad historical account values, and also incorrect basis allocation in the case of multiple spinoffs. I don't know the current status of those problems, but since no one ever believes Quicken's rate of return calculations, the account value problem doesn't make anything much worse.
See this thread for more on these issues. Any updates from anyone would be welcome.
And since most of the people who don't believe Quicken's "rate of return calcuations", do not understand Quicken's rate of return calculations ... but still insist that the *calculations* are wrong; you would do well to ignore the "no one" who doesn't believe in Quicken's "calculations".
At least in the newer versions of Quicken, you can check the "Glossary" in the Portfolio tab of the the Investing Center, and see for yourself what the definitions are for Quickens "return" calculations. And you can test them in Excel, as others have done and shown them to be correct.
I do believe it's true that some of Quicken's *calculations" of investment transactions have been shown to be faulty - if I recall, *relatively* rare transactions - but I think the
*calculations* of "return" have been shown to be accurate ... when the underlying data is accurate.
What this means - if true - is that the "behind the scenes" calculations (of investment transactions) are at least at important as the "return calculations". So the "account value" problem could easily be the entire problem.
My favorite missing Turbotax feature is having all imports from financial applications (e.g., Quicken, Money) flagged as estimates. I'd unmark the items one by one as I confirm the data in each tax line.
Macintax may have done this 12+ years ago while it was still owned by its creators.
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