So they deducted it last year as alimony paid, and the spouse gave it back to them in 2018?   wouldn't that make it alimony received?

Alimony Recapture is not about repayment. It is about the reduction of the payments over the first three years being too much. Is it $15,000 over 2 and/or 3 years?

Just add it to Other Income, the former line 21.

I googled it and found some neat and simple recapture calculators.

Can't you just put in a negative number

I don't have a problem with the calculations. I wasn't clear but the amount is a reduction in income by someone who has already claimed alimony they received in prior years, so the amount wouldn't need to be a negative amount. The only issue I have is that there is no way to call it recapture instead of alimony paid as per IRS instructions.

this is from turbo tax blog. As the payer of alimony, you report the "Alimony Recapture" on Line 11 of Form 1040. As you already noticed, you must cross out the word "Received" on Line 11 and write in the word "Recapture". On the dotted line next to the amount, enter your spouse's last name and social security number or IRS individual taxpayer identification number. In order to do this you'll have print out the tax return (obviously) and paper file, do not e-file, the tax return.

So there's no way to do it and efile. That's disappointing but thanks for finding the blog, I didn't see that one.

TurboTax may not have a way to Efile it like that....but you may be able to bypass error checking in ProSeries and still Efile.