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I received and sold Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) from my employer in 2020. Since these RSUs are included in my W2, in prior years I just put in the proceeds and cost basis for each lot. But this year it looks like RSUs fall under employee stock plans (maybe they did in past years and I didn't catch it) so I have to fill out a few more worksheets; none of which change my taxable income or federal / state tax due. However, during the Smart Check review, I keep getting errors on four of the worksheets on Form 1099-B section 25, after the lot is listed, the next line is blank and its looking for me to enter something but it should be blank. I had 10 sales, it looks like this only impacts 4 sales of which all shares were sold to cover taxes. Anyone else having this issue? Any recommendations?
If you received a stock award (e.g. Restricted Stock, or RSUs), tax is assessed on the value of the stock on the day the stock vests/ is delivered. That amount is ordinary income, and is included in Wages on Box 1 of your W-2 for that year. Your cost basis is also the value of the stock on the day it vests or is delivered. The problem is, brokers don't have (or don't report) that information. If you know the amount that was added to your income, that is your actual cost basis. In order to keep from paying tax on the stock award twice, you have to correct your cost basis. To do so, go to that 1099-B transaction, and on the page with the Description, Date Acquired, Date of Sale, Sales Price, and Adjusted Cost or Other Basis, click on "I'll enter additional info on my own". On the next page, enter the "Corrected cost basis"
Like the person you were replying to, I had RSUs that vested and were distributed to me, which I sold [for both long and short terms losses! :( ]. My 1099-B provided the correct basis information to me, but did not report it to the IRS. Using what is shown on my 1099-B, I entered the basis information into Turbotax, which calculated my losses into the return. Smart Check Error, however tells me on each entry that "Employer Worksheet: Line 25, Column (b) should be entered." I have no idea what should be entered, where I would obtain that information, and where this worksheet can be found. Is this material to my return? Can I just ignore it and file?
Additionally, after entering that information for each sale, Turbotax asks me to enter information about the vesting of the RSUs, which seems to me to be irrelevant, since the only RSUs I sold had fully vested and been distributed to me. I have ignored the fields on that page, as nothing I have from my employer regarding vesting matches the transactions in which I sold the shares distributed to me.
I have the same problem as DavidD66. I initially imported information from Fidelity, but then tried inputting the information on my own. No matter what I do, it keeps telling me there is an error on Line 25 Column B. It is telling me to enter information in row 2. I have no idea what I am supposed to enter. I sold 1 unit which is listed in row 1. But since I only sold 1 unit, I shouldn't have to enter anything in row 2. It makes no sense.
What I did was enter the corrected cost basis shown on the 1099-B from Fidelity for each of the RSU lots that were vested and distributed to me. However, turbotax asked me to add additional information regarding the vesting of those lots, which I did not enter, because it makes no sense to me how that could be relevant, when I only could sell shares that had vested and I had paid for. Additionally, when I went to my employer's web site to look for vesting, it was reporting very small quarterly numbers of shares vested which did not correlate at all to the amounts of shares being sold in my 1099-B. So I felt this had to be a blind alley, so I ignored those data fields in Turbotax. However, when I ran checker at the end, for every transaction in the 1099-B, I got the error message to state that Line 25, column (b) of the employer stock worksheet should be entered.
Beyond that, these transactions were all losses, and yet Fidelity reported them to the IRS as gains, because it did not report the basis to the IRS (which it knew and reported to me). Fidelity's 1099-B also stated that it withheld substantial amounts from its distribution of the proceeds. How do I confirm whether this 1099-B that was automatically entered into Turbotax (incorrectly without reporting the basis Fidelity knew) correctly reported the substantial amounts it withheld?
I suspect it did not, because Turbotax is calculating a refund for me that is only a little more than last year's, and I had none of these transactions in the previous year. It seems to me that with all these transactions being losses, I should get a refund of all the amounts withheld, and they are substantial.
I am having the same error. It would be great if Turbo Tax provided additional context on the RSU questions or more examples. Turbo tax smart check is complaining on all my RSU transactions where the only transaction was to cover for taxes in 2020.
I was able to fix the errors in this worksheet. TurboTax is trying to calculate the RSU income based on the information provided and will then ask you to double check it. I do encourage people to fix the errors because while it did not impact my stock gains, for some reason the AMT came out way differently and my tax liability went down.
I got this error when I didn't correctly entered the number of shares vested for the lot. This is important for all those RSU lots vested during the year (2020 this case). If you sold shares from the same lot multiple times during the year you need to divide the number of shares vested across these transactions appropriately. For example, I vested 200 shares. 70 were sold for taxes. Then I sold 30 shares later in the year. You need to put 140 (70% of 200) as the vested shares in the worksheet for the 70 shares. And 60 (30% of 200) as the vested shares for the 30 shares transaction.
I had RSUs which I sold in 2020. My custodian, Fidelity, issued to me a 1099-B with all the crucial information, and ONLY SOME OF IT DOWNLOADED TO MY TURBOTAX RETURN. Revealingly, all the transactions were losses but: (1) Fidelity knew, and reported to me on the 1099-B, my basis on all the sales, but did not report it to the IRS (Why?) Instead, it reported the sales as gross to the IRS, and withheld substantial amounts that were not due, because the trades were losses, (2) The download to Turbotax did not include the basis for each of the sales, which I had to enter manually.
The problem in Turbotax was that it kept throwing errors on my Federal return relating to the 1099-B. In every case where I entered the basis, Turbotax followed it with another screen asking for information about the vesting of the RSUs. I had left that blank on all the entries. Who needs to ask about vesting? You can't sell shares you don't own!
The fix was that for each entry, I went to that additional screen and just entered the number of shares in each lot sold. That very same number already appeared in several prior fields. For some stupid reason, that number of shares did not auto-replicate from one screen to the next - for the same transaction -- and that caused the problem.
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