Closed an HSA account a while back but assets / cash reappeared - how to fix now?

Question

Hello,

I saw someone else had this same issue in 2020 and the advice was to outright delete the account, but given that an HSA has so many tax advantages isn't it important to keep all the transaction history?

This may have been my issue since 2020, also, I've been ignoring for a while the closed account suddenly carrying a balance.  I just called the firm that had the supposed balance and was able to trace the issue which seems to be AN ERROR IN QUICKEN.  To rollover the HSA (with an investment component attached) I had to sell assets, which were then transferred to the bank side of the same firm's account, and subsequently a check sent to the new firm.

What I'm finding now in Quicken is that the transfer of sales proceeds to the bank is not showing in the investment account, and in the bank account it's been converted to a single item split, with the category being the [investment account] properly labeled in brackets as a transfer, in the bank account.  However, the corresponding transfer out doesn't show at all in the investment account.

So it's a weird one-sided transfer.  Is there any way to fix this in closed accounts without deleting the accounts?

Partial answer: I just clicked on 'cash' under holdings and was able to adjust the balance to 0.  There's still some random holdings showing, but it's small potatoes … I don't seem to be able to do any further cleanup.

debbieacog · Answer

Hi Tom - correct, it was fine, and then one day I noticed in the "More accounts" where I'd hidden all the closed accounts having a balance, and traced it to this one.  It doesn't let me change any of the transactions or add a new one, though it did let me adjust the cash balance which then got registered as a MiscExp for today.

Your guess about data corruption seems likely - though it's interesting it hit the HSA account as another poster had the same issue with their HSA account (that thread is closed or I would have added to it).

I'll see if I'm wrong about not being able to do new entries on closed accounts … that seems the simplest would be to redo the transfer.

Tom Young · Answer

I guess that at some point in the process everything was OK, (the investment account leg of the old HSA had a balance of $0, the bank account leg of the old HSA had a balance of $0, the correct dollar amount of cash was in the new HSA), and then suddenly it wasn't?

If there's no new entries in these old accounts, i.e., transactions occurring after the time that the accounts were closed, and all you're seeing is that there's an entry missing in the investment account which leaves the cash in that account,  and that the other leg of the entry (transfer of cash from the investment account to bank account) now looks pretty funky, my guess is that there has been data corruption in your file, somehow.

I seems that the "Partial answer' means you brought up the "Update Cash Balance" screen and set cash to $0?  But that "There's still some random holdings showing" certainly shouldn't be the case so perhaps that's evidence of data corruption too.

At this point I guess the first thing I'd try would be to make a backup, delete the weird entry in the cash account, and then create the proper transfer again to see if that puts things to right.

Another, maybe better approach would to make a Quicken Copy of the file, maybe changing the name of the copied file to make it distinct from your live file, then do a validation of the copied file to see if that works.  You will, however, have to re-connect any downloading accounts in the file.