Is TurboTax Premier supposed to be able to handle dispositions of rental property?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
January 13, 2023
1 reply
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I'm using TurboTax Premier desktop edition and I cannot get it to handle the gain on the sale of a rental property. Under the depreciation section I've selected 'Yes' when asked 'Did you stop using this asset in 202x?', I've entered the date of the sale/disposition, populated the asset/land sales prices and expenses and completed the remainder of the questionnaire.

Two insane things then happen:

(1) The software decides there is "No gain or loss on this asset..." and "Based on our calculations, you have no gain or loss on your disposition..." which is very, very wrong. There is absolutely a significant gain.

(2) In contradiction to (1) the federal and state 'tax due' counters in the top left do in fact jump up considerably upon entering the sale data. It obviously has calculated some kind of gain and correponding tax in spite of what it says. The amount of that tax is nowhere near close to correct. I know the ballpark numbers already, and what TurboTax is showing is in excess of double those amounts.

I appreciate it's early days for the 2022 edition and there is likely much yet to be patched to the software. So, I performed the same exercise in my 2021 edition and entered the sale in that year just to see what the software would do. It produced exactly the same behavior described above as in the 2022 edition.

I'm curious if others have encountered the same problem, and whether TurboTax is simply unusable for handling a disposition of rental property. Frankly, this will be a 2023 issue at which time I will entrust it to an accountant. However, I was just curious to see how far I could get in TurboTax and at least use it to validate (roughly) my Excel-calculated estimated tax. Obviously, the brackets/rates would be different but the result is not even on the same planet let alone ballpark.

A

Anonymous_

Employee

There must be an input error somewhere or perhaps there is no (or incorrect) basis information (possibly accumulated depreciation missing).

Alternatively, you could be looking at the wrong subsection in the program.

It might help if you stated whether you were using an online or desktop version of TurboTax.

A

Anonymous

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

It pulls the basis information itself as I have it in the depreciation history from the prior return. The numbers were pre-populated and correct. It also pulls the accumulated depreciation and asks me to either type the same number back in or adjust it as necessary, so I have typed that back in.

The subsection I am in is the depreciation subsection under Rental Property. The software tells you to hit Edit on that if you have stopped using the asset (and gives 'sold' as an example), which I do and that is where I have entered all the information. It is a bit fiddly in that you have to keep editing the same subsection to get additional questions to come up, but in the end all of the cost basis, depreciation and sold price data were entered with the sale price and expenses allocated between asset and land in the same proportion as the cost basis.

Even if I have made a mistake, there's still the issue that it explicitly says there has been no gain or loss but then adds a whole bunch of tax due to the counter anyway. So it's not consistent within itself regardless of my input figures.

As stated, it's the desktop edition. And if it makes a difference, it's for Mac.