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I am helping my son and his wife do their 2025 taxes in TurboTax Standard Desktop.
She opened a FHSA in 2025 and contributed and I was able to get her return to Netfile.
He opened a FHSA in 2024 and then contributed the full eligible amount in 2025. All the math in all the forms looks fine.
But in the Netfile review process, this error is generated:
When you click on Fix, you get this:
So far as we can tell, all the information has been entered correctly and matches his 2025 FHSA Participation Room Statement that we downloaded from CRA today.
I have to say that some of the questions in the CRA forms are terribly frustrating, and in my view, the forms could be greatly simplified:
The opening Step 1 question is different than the statement right under it. He did not open his first FHSA in 2025, so the answer to the question is No. But the statement right under it says "You opened your first FHSA or became a successor holder in 2025 or in a previous year." We he did that, so the answer must be Yes.
All of these "or in a previous year" questions could also be taken to apply only to the second part of the sentence (the successor holder part in the statement above), or to the whole sentence (which includes the opening of your first FHSA).
In any event, we believe we have filled out the form / Schedule 15 correctly, everything matches the 2025 FHSA Participation Room Statement, but TurboTax Standard Desktop 2025 keeps kicking back a Netfile error with no error number. Please help us sort this out so this return can be filed.
posted
Thanks for the response.
Update: I called in to the Customer Support line. Someone answered right away. He suggested changing the answer in Step 1 to NO. But that did not work. His other suggestions did not solve the issue, and was escalated to someone with greater superpowers.
But before they came on the line, I started experimenting. Based on a re-read of page 1 of Schedule 15, which offers different wording about how to answer Step 1, I went back to Step 1 and changed the answer to NO. AND I removed the 2024 that had been entered in the next field when we had answered Yes before. Once that date was gone, we were able to get past the Netfile error and file successfully.
Here is the correct answer if you opened a FHSA prior to 2025 and aren't a successor holder:
This is not TurboTax's fault - it is CRA's fault for not wording their questions clearly. If you read the How to complete this schedule explanation on the first page of Schedule 15, the explanation is slightly more clear. But the wording in Step 1 easily leads anyone who has ever opened an FHSA in a prior year to answer YES. If the wording was more like the bullets in the explanation on page 1, this would not be an issue.
Be sure to answer Step 1 based on this explanation and not the wording with Step 1:
IMHO, FHSA account holders would benefit by some significant simplification to the CRA Schedule 15 FHSA forms and the format of the CRA FHSA Participation Room Statements. Make the questions and the statements follow the same order so that you don't have to jump around all over the place trying to parse sentences to figure out what information goes where.
Glad to have figured this out now - I have three more adult children to help through this issue in the coming days.
Happy tax filing everyone!
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