Hello forum, and Thanks for any input. I'm retired, with my income coming only from dividends and capital gains, etc.
I've always used Turbotax, and never had any problem inputting the adjustments for "gov't. obligations"
for each item on my 1099-DIV (to exempt it from state taxation, and then multiplying, etc. etc. ).
But now I'm trying HR-BLOCK for the first time (premium online, via UnitedWay which makes it free, if income
is under around 60k), and after searching for hours, I find
no way to do it. To be more specific, there is no way to make the VERY SIMPLE AND COMMON "exemption" adjustments (i.e.,
reduce the dividend income tax owed to STATES according to the amount of interest on US gov't. securities.
For each of my separate income sources on each 1099-DIV screen, HRBlock shows roughly 15 boxes that can be checked, beginning
with "Payers Name", followed by the standard "1a Total ordinary dividends " and ending with
"Box 12 Specified private activity bond interest dividends".
And none of the above boxes are relevant to this problem.
Below all of those boxes, there is NO BOX to check like Turbotax has ("I need to adjust.....").
The only boxes to check are the following four:
>>State tax was withheld in Box 15
>>I’m holding this account as a nominee — all or part of this income belongs to someone else.
>>All or part of the dividends were paid on restricted stock received from an employer.
>>The FATCA filing requirement box is checked on this 1099-DIV.
So, I guess I will try to "over-ride it".....How does the following sound:
I can probably just insert the adjusted numbers myself into my state returns with HRBlock, right?
I know I PHYSICALLY can.......but....I'm not totally sure it'll be correct.
And I'm wondering how do states know if it was done correctly (since I'm not 100% sure myself). I DO KNOW I have the correct
exemption amounts for each of my funds, simply by getting the "percentage information" off of Vanguard's (and my
other mutual fund companies) websites, and doing the multiplications. So my spreadsheet has all these numbers
ready to go.
So, my plan is to just insert these adjusted numbers (dividend income with the aforementioned exemption amounts
subtracted out) into my 2 state returns, within HRBlock. (Yes, I'm a part-year resident of 2 states, since I moved in 2018, and both
states do allow these exemptions). Basically, when you get to the state sections of HR Block, it asks you (for each state)
what your income was (for that state) for each pre-filled category of income, and the software has already filled in the "federal amount"
for that category (and state).
So my plan is to just insert my dividend income numbers in these state sections, adjusted for the "exempt" amounts (which
I already calculated, but will now do some more adjustments based on various factors such as time period in each state, and time of dividend
distribution,, and doing pro-rations, etc. etc.).
Does this sound OK so far? I'm not sure what problems I might end up with, when states end up seeing a "state-XYZ taxable income"
that will be a little lower than what my federal return would imply (without the adjustments)....but also complicated by the
fact that I'm a part-year resident of 2 states.......How do states know if these numbers are correct in this case, with
2 states involved and ALSO no way to "tell them" I'm adjusting for this "interest on govt securities" ?
(I do plan to keep careful records of my calculations in case I'm audited, and I want to make sure its correct
.....and by the way, these "adjustments" I'll
be making are fairly small...almost makes me wonder if all this writing was worth the amount of money I'll be saving
(probably not!!..ha ha).
