medical expenses date range issue

[tyavorska]

Hi! When I enter my medical expenses as a total number (the amount is greater than 3%) and then enter a date range I prefer, which is Dec 1, 2021-Nov 30, 2022, I get zero on my medical expense deductions line. When I change the date range to January 1- Dec 31, 2022, the correct amount of medical expenses appears and gets added to my return. However, I would like to use the initial date range. I already checked off boxes for both years that I'm submitting my expenses for. Could you please help me troubleshoot this?

[tyavorska]

Here's the solution in case anyone else is having the same problem. 

After almost two hours on the phone with support, they told me that the issues can be fixed if I enter the end date as Dec 31, 2022. However, there was no way to enter an end date as anything earlier than that. I could still enter an earlier start date, but that would result in the claim period being greater than a year, so I did not want to proceed with this.

Based on reading something else on this forum, I had a hypothesis that when the total amount of the claim is entered rather than individual receipts, the system assigns a default date to it. I suspect that this date is Dec 31, 2022, and this is the reason that the system does not recognize the claim if the end date of the claim period is anything before then.

Here's where the glitch was for me: when I started entering my medical expenses, I initially checked off the option that I have Receipts from 2022 only. The next page offered me an option to enter them line by line vs as a lump sum. I chose the latter for convenience sake. Later on, when I realized some of my expenses were also from 2021, I went back and checked off that box too. Nothing changed for me at this point. But I believe not having both 2021 and 2022 boxes checked off right away was the issue.

How I solved this is that I deleted my lump sum entry altogether and started over. This time, I checked off right away that I have receipts for 2021 and 2022, and when I proceeded to the next page there was actually no option to add a lump sum, and only the option for itemized receipts. Once I entered all these receipts, I no longer had any issues selecting the correct claim period. Hope this helps someone else out there who runs into this!