Question

TurboTax Makes Errors Calculating the CA Mortgage Interest Deduction

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
December 21, 2022
1 reply
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I've used TurboTax for many years. I'm currently in the process of filing amended returns for 2019, 2020, and 2021 because TurboTax did not properly calculate the California mortgage interest deduction. And TurboTax's instructions are poor. I've now spent many hours fixing errors.

Make sure that you look at the CA Adjustment Worksheet for your CA return. In my case, instead of adding the difference between the Federal deduction and the California deduction allowed (which results in a larger CA deduction, thus lowering the amount of tax owed), TurboTax subtracted the difference (exact opposite of what the software should have done). This caused me to pay more CA tax than I should have.

And TurboTax seems to have a hard time handling mortgages greater than $750k that were refinanced after 2017. I think I'm allowed to deduct up to $1 million of interest because my original purchase mortgage was prior to 2017, thus the refi is "grandfathered" in up to the $1M limit.

A

Anonymous_

Contact Support.

What is the TurboTax phone number? (intuit.com)

J

jimretz1Author

@Anonymous_ thanks for posting the phone number. I called it, and got through to someone pretty quickly (about resolving a different issue).

D

davy_xyly

The bug may have only occurred with mortgages above $1 million because California's allowable limit is different from Federal limits. However I don't completely trust TurboTax anymore. Now I review the actual tax forms that are submitted to the IRS and California's FTB.

Maybe a different bug but also happens to mortgage from 750k to 1M:

In CA state tax schedule E it will use the deducted amount of mortgage interest in Federal, but not the full amount. I just found it out this year. Never ever trust this product.