I’m trying to determine if my son needs to file a tax return this year. He is a college freshman about to turn 19. He had to file a return in 2017 and 2018 because he was issued a 1099 and had to pay self-employment taxes, that is not the case for 2019.
He had $344.25 on his W-2 from work study earnings. His father is on disability and he drew a check based on that until he graduated high school, $1,584 for 2019. The accountant that did our taxes the last 2-3 years said that income didn’t have to be reported, but not sure if that is still true with current situation.
I am coming up with $5814.41 in qualified expenses and $11,083 in scholarships and grants. This doesn’t match the 1098-T, not sure why. I included tuition, fees, bookstore charge for books, and receipt for books that were charged to my credit card as qualified expenses. I did not include housing, meal plan, or books that my son bought from other students and doesn’t have receipts.
Any advice? I considered taking his stuff to an accountant(our previous one retired) but hate to waste money if it isn’t necessary.
It has a section about “who must file”; table 2 lists the criteria for dependents. It also has a section about “who should file” even if not required to.
TurboTax Freedom edition is free for his income level.
He would enter his W-2 income. Then the 1098T if it’s correct. He can enter book expenses that aren’t listed on 1098T. Some fees might not be qualified fees (health fee, transportation).
If he received more scholarship than qualified education expenses, then the excess is taxable income.
Even if he doesn’t owe tax it might be easier to file FAFSA if he files a return.
“TurboTax Freedom edition is free for his income level.”
Be careful with TurboTax to make sure you sign in from the IRS freefile link (freefile.intuit.com). The Freedom edition that is linked from TurboTax.com is not the same, it is far more restrictive in terms of allowed forms and income level and tries to force you to upgrade to the paid edition if you have things like Schedule 1.
Intuit’s behavior in this regard is incredibly exploitative of poor people who don’t know better and extremely reprehensible.
Yes, it can be confusing with the TurboTax products and I think they should just offer one FREE version for people who qualify income wise or by EITC.
But we have used the Freedom versión for the past few years for our kids and it let’s you efile federal and state tax return for free.
It even efiled two state returns for my D for free.
We don’t qualify for the Freedom versión so we have used Taxact for federal return. I think it charged me less than $30.
For the state return they want to charge me extra, so I just do that for free on the state revenue website.