Spot on chasetax.  I threw in another fake charitable deduction of a $1,000 to test whether the itemized deductions would carry over and it did.  My original ID was $127 over the threshold and I finally realized that the client was better taking the 1040 front side charitable deduction of $300 plus the standard deduction of $24,800 as compared to the ID of $24,927.  It took awhile, but it finally clicked.  By the way, I did remove the fake charitable deduction. Thank you to all for the responses.