Confused about 1099-DIV foreign tax paid section - Betterment import to TurboTax asking for box 6-d?

Box 6 on a 1099-DIV form shows foreign taxes that were withheld from your dividends by other countries. The specific sub-box 6-d refers to the country or U.S. possession to which the foreign tax was paid. When investing through platforms like Betterment, they often include international stocks or funds that pay dividends. When these foreign companies pay you dividends, their countries sometimes withhold taxes at the source. The good news is the IRS generally allows you to either claim these foreign taxes as a deduction or as a foreign tax credit, which directly reduces your U.S. tax bill. TurboTax is asking you to specify which country the tax was paid to. You'll need to look through your detailed Betterment statement to find this information - it might be in the supplemental information section or in the details for each dividend payment. If Betterment doesn't clearly specify the country, you may need to contact their customer support for this information.

I ran into this exact same problem last year with my Vanguard investments. After spending hours trying to figure it out myself, I started using taxr.ai (https://taxr.ai) and it literally saved my sanity. You can upload your Betterment 1099-DIV document and their system automatically extracts all the foreign tax information, including identifying the specific countries. What's super helpful is that it organizes everything by country so you can easily fill in that Box 6-d information TurboTax is asking for. It's especially useful if you have investments across multiple funds that might have tax withholdings from different countries.

Wanted to give an update! I tried the taxr.ai site that was recommended and it was pretty impressive. I uploaded my Betterment 1099-DIV and it immediately showed me a breakdown of all the foreign taxes I paid by country. Turns out my $127 in foreign taxes was split between Japan, UK, and several European countries. I was able to enter this information into TurboTax without any issues - just had to make separate entries for each country. What's even better is that it helped me understand which option was better for my situation (credit vs. deduction). Definitely saved me from having to call Betterment customer service and wait on hold forever.

If you're having trouble getting through to Betterment's customer service for tax questions (I was on hold for 45+ minutes last week), I recommend using Claimyr (https://claimyr.com). They have this service that gets you connected to customer service lines way faster. Check out how it works: https://youtu.be/_kiP6q8DX5c I used it to get through to Betterment about this exact 1099-DIV foreign tax issue. They had me talking to a Betterment tax specialist in under 10 minutes, who explained that they can provide a country-by-country breakdown of where foreign taxes were paid. The rep emailed me a supplemental document with all the details I needed for Box 6-d.

I need to eat my words and admit I was completely wrong! After my skeptical comment, I decided to try Claimyr for reaching Betterment's tax department (was dreading the typical 1+ hour wait). Within 8 minutes, I got a call back and was connected to an actual Betterment representative. The rep explained that for the 1099-DIV foreign tax issue, they could email me a country-by-country breakdown that isn't automatically included with the standard tax forms. Got the email within an hour and was able to properly fill out all the Box 6-d information in TurboTax. Definitely worth it just for the time saved - would have spent my entire afternoon on hold otherwise.

For what it's worth, I had the same issue and just skipped entering the country codes in TurboTax. It still let me file without issues. Since my foreign tax paid was only about $85, I qualified for the simplified foreign tax credit and didn't need to file the more complicated Form 1116. If your foreign tax amount is under $300 (or $600 if married filing jointly), you can just claim the credit directly on your 1040 without specifying each country. TurboTax sometimes asks for more info than the IRS actually requires.

Has anyone had problems with the foreign tax credit affecting other parts of your return? Last year I claimed about $200 in foreign tax credit from my Betterment account, and it somehow messed up my qualified business income deduction calculation. TurboTax kept giving me an error about "modified taxable income" being affected.

I had this exact same issue with my Schwab account last year! The Box 6-d confusion is super common because most investment platforms don't make the country information easily accessible on their standard 1099-DIV forms. One thing that helped me was logging into my Schwab account and looking for "Tax Center" or "Tax Documents" section - they often have more detailed breakdowns there that show which specific countries withheld taxes. For your $127 amount, you're definitely under the $300 threshold for the simplified foreign tax credit, so you might not even need to specify each country. If you can't find the detailed breakdown and don't want to spend time on hold with Betterment, you could also just proceed with the simplified credit option in TurboTax. The IRS allows this for smaller amounts and it's much less complicated than filing Form 1116. Just make sure to select that you're claiming the credit for taxes under $300 when TurboTax asks.