[GNC] Recovery vs. reimbursement

[Adam H. Kerman]

12:24pm -0000 05/12/26 Patrick James via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash...:

>The simplified summary here is that you don't get both the future recovery 
>and the past medical expense tax benefit. In other words, you're reimbursed 
>for the amount you claimed as a tax deduction, so that effectively erases 
>your prior medical expense/tax deduction. The in the weeds discussion is 
>about the computations given the recovery is in a future year, and then the 
>larger issue is how to keep TAX REPORTING records for this sort of 
>situation.

>Then there is yet another issue about significance. . . . 

Your points are well taken. However, Congress had just changed the law, 
making the purchase of these specific medical supplies eligible for Medicare 
reimbursement. I was not anticipating reimbursement, hence I took the 
deduction. The store asked me to allow them to submit the bills as a test 
case in how they would seek reimbursement as it might mean more business for 
them in future, so I provided a prescription and authorized them to fuss 
with the bills. Yhe reimbursement came in three checks, from the store as 
the received one insurance payment, from Medicare, then from the supplement 
insurance carrier.

>The "income" here is only for tax purposes, as the payment is reimbursement 
>for expenses from past year(s).

Exactly right, which is why when I prepared the tax return, I simply took 
the reimbursements as a contra expense -- perfectly logical from a 
bookkeeping perspective -- rather than as other income as required by the 
tax code.

Since I had to fix the other income subaccounts in GnuCash with respect to 
this issue, I spotted entries for a payment for refundable state income tax 
credits recorded as "other income". This was during COVID. Since IRS 
eventually told taxpayers to exclude these refundable credits from 
reportable income for, er, political reasons, these should have been 
recorded as a contra expense for state and local taxes with no tax line 
mapping and not as other income.