If a rental property is sold without any deprecition taken in the past. Can prior year depreciation amount be entered as 0?

[kwyp]

If a rental property is sold without depreciation taken in the past, can it be correct as "0"  for the prior year depreciation amount?  Under this senario, it seems no ordinary earned income with the return. Only capital gain tax related to this rental sale. 

However, if enter a data for the prior year depreciation amount based on depreciation table, the tax will be included two parts:1.) capital gain amount.  2.) ordinary earned income, which equals taxable income (line 15 1040) -Gapital gain amount (line 8 1040) 

It seems if no depreciation taken in the past, at the year when rental is sold, will result less tax due to no ordinary earned income. 

[BobKamman]

Less tax will also be due if you add amounts to basis for fairy dust.  Imaginary numbers for imaginary improvements.  Some might call it cheating, but if IRS doesn't catch it, do you care? For that matter, if you don't subtract depreciation allowable from basis, what's to prevent you from later filing amended returns to get refunds?  It's not like IRS is going to match up other returns to see if the same property was later sold.  And yes, you could go back 20 years, if taxes are still owed for prior years.  

[sjrcpa]

@kwyp 

You've already asked about this a few times. Here's one:

https://accountants.intuit.com/community/proconnect-tax-discussions/discussion/miss-depreciation-in-...