Congress retroactively extends Federal tax credit for home EV chargers, etc.

UPDATE for TurboTax users:

Once the IRS issued a revised Form 8911 back in February, TT indicated it would add this retroactive "extender" tax credit for EVSE equipment for 2018 into TT's 2018 software by mid-March so that TT users could easily file an amended 2018 tax return to claim the resurrected credit.

After wasting a lot of time recently trying to do just that with my TT 2018 s/w, I went back to the TT support pages and found the following post:

"In December 2019, Congress passed and the President signed into law the Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2019.... The law extends many already expired provisions that provide tax relief ... [including] the extension of energy efficient tax credits.

"For 2018, we are currently working on adding the extenders into 2018 TurboTax. This is projected to be completed by mid-May 2020."
​

Bottom line: the completion of this TT project has been changed from mid-March 2020 to mid-May 2020. Recommendation: go into SWW (sit, watch & wait) mode on this if you want to use TT to easily prepare & file an amended 2018 federal tax return to capture the benefit of the restored 2018 EVSE credit.

You can both see this information on TT's support web site and also sign up for an email notification when they finally get the job done: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/tax-topics/help/2018-extenders-passed-under-taxpayer-certainty-and-disaster-tax-relief-act-of-2019/00/1197091

 

Further update: Now have received an email from TT / Intuit:

"Dear Valued TurboTax Customer,

You recently signed up to be notified when updates were available for the 2018 TurboTax software to update the Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2019 ,

At this time these Extended Tax Laws have been made available in the TurboTax 2018 software to allow TurboTax users the chance to amend their 2018 return to claim these tax credits.

Sincerely,
TurboTax Help"​

 

I will be the first to acknowledge that I am no tax expert, but I think your statement may be in error.

The only thing that counts for receiving these credits is whether you have taxable income of an amount sufficient to have a tax liability for the year you place a plug-in EV or related EVSE into service. These credits are so-called "non-refundable" credits, meaning that if you don't have a tax liability in the first place you won't get a credit/refund above and beyond your tax liability. 1099 income comes in lots of different flavors, but common ones include self-employment income that you would normally report on a Schedule C, taxable interest and/or ordinary dividends that you would normally report on Schedule B, etc. etc. As far as I understand it, any 1099 reporting taxable income eventually would find its way into and be included in taxable income on the 1040, which would then be the basis for determining your tax liability to which the non-refundable EV or EVSE tax credit would apply, but only to the extent of your tax liability.

You may want to double check your own situation with a real tax advisor before you give up on these two credits.