My new york state employee benefit keeps coming up as a military disbursement. It is not. Never been in the military. Can you help?

[doodlenoodle01]

My new york state employee pension keeps coming up as a military disbursement.  It is not.  Never been in the military.  Can you help?

[SteamTrain]

Maybe.

Sometimes a setting internally has the same value as another setting....like if the NY State pensions have the same exemption code as Military pensions do......then if you re-edit the 1099-R form, the selection resets to the first selection on the follow-up page.   In that case you just set it once and leave it alone.   Internally they are the same....exemption-wise.

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@rjs 

You work with NY?  does the NY State Employee pension setting selection for a 1099-R do a reset to "appear" to be Military if you edit the 1099-R after the first time thru?  (and is the actual form code the same for both)

[rjs]

@doodlenoodle01 

Are you talking about the screen that asks "Where Is This Distribution From?" It's not clear what you mean by "a military disbursement." Do you mean that it's selecting the first option, "US Government (Including Military)"? Which option did you select initially? Please give the exact wording.

As SteamTrain suspected, if you edit the 1099-R, or go back to the screen in any way, the selection on that screen may be different from what you selected. For some of the selections it does reset to "US Government (Including Military)." It does not appear to make any difference in your New York tax return, but to play safe, if you go back to that screen, reselect the correct option.

@SteamTrain 

I'm not sure what you mean by the "form code." Are you talking about the State Use Code (or "special use code") on the 1099-R? There are 10 options on the TurboTax screen. There are only 4 State Use Codes for New York, so obviously several of the selections put the same State Use Code on the 1099-R form. There is no "New York State Employee Pension" option, so I don't know which option doodlenoodle01 is selecting. When you go back to the screen, it does reset to the first option in the list that uses the State Use Code that's on the form. So that probably explains what doodlenoodle01 is seeing. We'll know for sure if she tells us precisely which option she selected and which option it resets to.

[SteamTrain]

@rjs   

Yep....that State Use Code is the one I was talking about.

On my Premier desktop software, that code is set based on the person's selection on the "Where is This Distribution From?" page. 

My NC software used to initiate something like 8 different selections on that page, several of which put the same letter in that worksheet's state use code, primarily because the code letter would eventually generate the same state exemption from state taxation.  NC has since pared down the selections to fewer, so fewer codes are used in that code box.  But that's for NC, not NY.