David -
That is incredibly helpful information. Thank you.
Here's the thing. I let TurboTax autofill my wife's W-2 from the federal government. The autofill miscoded several entries into box 14. From your explanation, I can see why this happened. Box 14 on her actual W-2 includes the codes K, V, and Y, which are the codes you listed in Box 12. But the government has attached those codes in box 14 to the items I listed in my original post.
Does that make sense? Regardless, if we had not been suspicious about why we had a tax burden this year instead of a refund, all things being mostly equal to last year, we would have ended up paying quite a bit. Even then, we had to drill down deep into our returns and compare with last year's to figure out the coding error.
I've made a note to go back to entering W-2's by hand. I just think this is worth correcting. Others might end up paying when they don't need to.
Penn
