Quo Vadis - IRAs, RMDs, QCDs, etc.

Options
andyc3
andyc3 Member ✭✭✭
edited February 17 in Errors and Troubleshooting (Windows)

When will Quicken management bite the bullet and address the serious failure to address reporting (and record keeping) for IRAs and their related RMDs and QCDs? There is currently no useful reporting on RMD income (yes, income) because of the inability to accept that IRAs (and hence RMDs) represent DEFERRED INCOME and not just simple funds transfers from one bank account to another. All the lovely looking charts and graphs and columnar reports are bogus because they omit actual deferred income.

Worse, our family has a number of IRA accounts so at the various RMD times I have hours of error-prone work to transcribe accurate, downloaded data into a new split transaction within a non-IRA account. Talk about "Make Work." I am probably naive but it seems like the simple solution would be to relax the stricture on IRA (and similar) accounts to permit entry of, and reporting on, various split transaction categories and allow association of those categories as needed with 1099-R types.

Geez, my IRA trustee is perfectly happy to have my IRA send funds for Federal and state tax authorities. Why can't Quicken allow entry and reporting of gross distribution, net distribution, tax1, tax2, qcd1, qcd2 etc. from within the primary IRA account? My guess is that someone in Quicken executive is holding onto the idea that IRAs are not income (contrary to the law!). [Note: I can somewhat imagine the argument that "deferred" income is not consistent with a cash-based (in contrast to accrual-based) bookkeeping systems such as Quicken.

However, Quicken does deal nicely with loans, which represent "deferred" expenses. So why not deferred income?] Lastly, my annuity income, which is pretty equivalent to an IRA from the standpoint of periodic payouts and tax withholding, is correctly represented and reported in Quicken. The only difference is that I (or a surrogate) manage my IRA investments and my annuities are managed by a financial company beyond my reach (and of course the money isn't mine).

But the record-keeping and reporting concepts are the same. So, how about it Mr. Quicken - can you step up to the challenge to make IRA distribution management functional, a failure that has been documented for at least 5 and probably 10 years?

I look forward to escalation of this important issue amongst your analysis, database, and coding teams and real solutions to replace the existing time-sucking, error-prone, and report-invisible workaround.

[edited- put in some breaks to make it readable]

Comments

This discussion has been closed.

Categories