My experience with Pending went as it should have.
Wed morning I filed Federal, OR, and CA. Federal and OR accepted within 3 hours. CA pending. Thr morning got a CA reject with a clear explanation that basically line 92 on my non-resident form was blank. Fired up turbotax which downloaded updates. The Check eFile Status tab brought up the same explanation as the email I got and explained when the fix would be available. For me it was fixed and I could proceed. Did the re-check or whatever, printed a new PDF and line 92 looked good. Re-submitted. Got an accepted text an hour later.
As a programmer I’d speculate that turbotax submits our returns to the state and errors like this cause rejection by the state with an error code. Turbotax analyzes and updates their software for whatever they missed and bounces re-submission back to us. If turbotax already knew about the bug causing line 92 to be blank I doubt they would’ve let me submit in the first place.
It would be nice if turbotax got back to us with an error code or status code at the same time the return goes pending or at least within a couple days instead of letting us hang. This is obviously whats irking everyone.
In a related thread someone who talked to California’s Franchise Tax Board said you can definitely mail in your taxes and whichever version the state processes first (the eFile or the paper) will get processed first, while any others will be rejected (I file early to beat fraudsters for this reason). Of course you’ll have to do your own auditing for things like a blank line 92! Paper does get looked over by humans and I bet they would have handled something this simple without contacting me.
As California has no recollection of any of our taxes in a pending state (based on all the comments I’ve read), that means the taxes are in turbotax’s queue and either: we made a mistake caught at 2nd level validation (at turbotax facilities), or turbotax had a bug (in my case), or turbotax has a bug at their level that does not require us to handle, or that state is offline or delayed, or there’s a huge backlog of a million returns for the week. In the later three cases the return would eventually make it in. If I were still in pending state on April 15 I’d have to mail it.
