TurboTax continued to generate the error message until I truncated the employer name to 30 characters. I backed it off one character at a time starting with 35 until it stopped producing the error. The presence of a comma or a period character did not influence the result in my testing. On the screen where the W2 info is entered, TurboTax advises users enter this field exactly as it appears on the W2. This advice is given via a pop-up displayed when the help link next to the employer field is clicked. When clicked, the following message appears in the pop-up " How should I enter my employer's name?
Enter your employer's name and info exactly as it appears on your W-2.
The IRS will compare your employer's name with what's in their database and can reject your return if it doesn't match."
Should the user follow TurboTax's pop-up advice or shorten the field to get past the "Hidden Fed to State" error message?
TurboTax should change either the error detection or the help text guidance to remove the conflict and help users file the best way possible. TurboTax could be modified to auto-truncate this field. Why ask the user to do it? If it is flagged as an error, then why does the error message not present an editing screen for the W2 employer names? Instead an edit screen for a document that does not contain the employer names is posted. I do not like that the software needs an entry different than exactly it appears in the W2 truncated version while also containing help text saying that not entering data exactly as written will cause the IRS to reject the return.
