I don't recommend following the instructions on that page. I've dealt with this for 10 years on my taxes. This is the first year I've reported my W2 for IHSS. The IRS introducing "II" in box 12a should have fixed all the problems people have been having. In the past when I followed the official Turbotax instructions my tax return gets messed up.
So this year I decided to test this new "II" code in box 12a. TL;DR it works correctly in Turbotax. To help everyone I'm going to cover what I did in Turbotax.
I started off by doing my taxes like I do every year and ignore the IHSS W2. AKA I don't enter it on my tax return. My IHSS W2s have always had $0 in box 1. Boxes 3 and 5 have a non zero dollar mount. You aren't exempt from paying social security and medicare taxes. Once everything was entered I saw what my refund would be. Now I have a baseline to compare to.
Now I enter the IHSS W2 to see what happens. CA was nice to notify me of the W2 changes this year. I looked at the W2 and saw the new box 12a entry with code "II". So I thought maybe the IRS has fixed this crap finally. I decided to take a leap of faith and ignore everything I read and tried in the past. I went to the income section of Turbotax and entered the IHSS W2 just like any other W2. I entered the 12a amount and clicked on the code menu. YEY! Turbotax had the new "II" code in there. When the uncommon situations screen came up I told it I didn't have any. I DIDN'T check the medicade waivers box. Just don't. I moved on to revisit the EITC wizard. The wizard saw that I had a W2 with an amount in 12a with the code "II" and asked if I wanted to include it in the EITC calculation. Well, Turbotax seems to be working as expected this year (finally). I moved on to check my refund amount. It matched the refund amount I got the first time through. Then I went to e-file my taxes. DANG! I was reminded that you cant e-file when a W2 has $0 in box 1. Sooooooo, back to the income section to edit the IHSS W2 and enter $1 in box 1. After going through the checks for the 3rd time, I e-filed my return.
I hope my story errr rant helps someone out.
