Today TaxMama hears from Scott in Utah, who’s upset . “My wife and I E-filed using TurboTax online deluxe, reporting a lump sum Social Security payment. We had a refund coming from both fed and state. Then we got an IRS letter telling us ‘We changed the amount of taxable social security benefits on line 20b of your form 1040 because there was an error in the computation of the taxable amount.’ Now we owe a ton of money – and TurboTax says it will take six weeks to review my situation. What do we do now?”
TaxMama RepliesDear Scott,
Call up IRS and ask them to put a 60-day hold on your file. Tell them that you are working with
your software provider to find the problem. ...Meanwhile, do pester Turbo Tax and try to run the Lump Sum calculation yourself to see if the number on your tax return was correct. ...
Call TurboTax regularly and make a friendly, but persistent pest of yourself. Remind them that they told MarketWatch.com last year, that their program WILL handle this computation properly – so why should you have to wait six weeks for them to get this to work for you?
While you’re waiting, try to figure out the calculation yourself. Follow IRS’s worksheet on the Social Security lump sum calculation. See Lump Sum – example
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p915/ar02.html .
The Social Security Administration has recently issued new instructions for its employees about taxation of Social Security benefits but failed to mention the problems connected with lump sum payments of back Social Security benefits that cover more than one year. By the way, if your first thought is that the way this is handled is to file amended tax returns for earlier years, your first thought is dead wrong.
Yeah, and the POMS instructions say "The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is responsible for assessing and collecting taxes. Therefore, SSA employees will not answer questions about taxation such as:
ReplyDelete-- Will my benefits be taxed?; or
-- How much of my benefits will be taxed?