Vanguard 1099-R Distribution Amount Duplicated as Oregon Tax Withheld

[Bad-Robot]

After a 12-week delay, I got my Oregon Refund.

Curious about how my withholding nearly doubled I dug into the details.

I downloaded my Vanguard 1099-R from Vanguard and it showed no federal withholding.

I uploaded it into TurboTax and it duplicated the distribution as state tax withheld!

Anybody else have this problem????  What happened????

[SteamTrain]

Kind-of

1)  Vanguard import?  Yeah, sometimes the imported file structure can be garbled.  But that's pretty rare at this point in time as the special import file structure has been standardized for years now.  If the only thing missing was the Federal withholding, it's pretty easy to just edit the 1099-R after importing it to correct any mis-entries.  You really must "edit" any tax form you import...to check every line/box in the resulting TTX worksheet....and then answer critical follow-up questions.

2) Uploading from a PDF or Picture of the form?   Yep, mis-entries from that happens more often.  The TTX software "seems" to use some kind of AI to interpret what values are supposed to be entered in which boxes of the appropriate software's worksheet.  The AI is not flawless in its interpretations....thus again, you really need to EDIT every form you've uploaded to check to ensure that every value has gone into the correct worksheet line/box.

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Currently, importing tax forms from financial providers, results in far-far fewer errors than uploading PDFs or pictures.  And ALWAYS you need to doublecheck/edit every one for potential errors.   I always manually enter my 1099-R forms anyhow.   

(exception to importing tax forms from a financial provider, would be any ALLY 1099-INT forms. anyone with multiple CDs with them...that will result in improper 1099-INT forms in the software with missing $$ data.  TTX really needs to get hold of ALLY computer staff and fix that...it's been going on for many years now)

[Bad-Robot]

Hi SteamTrain,

Thank you for the reply.  I am a very old punch card guy with FORTRAN and IBM ASSEMBLER experience, so the concept of re-entering a form with a standard electronic exchange format violates all concepts of data integrity.   The Charles Schwab downloads are flawless and migrate to TT fine.   This is a worrisome issue and TT needs to state to the users that downloading data is not reliable and that the data need to be double checked.  Furthermore, the error checking needs to cross check obvious errors like the distribution and withholding for a state return are identical.  These are simple QC checks that a user would expect TT to perform.  

Bad-Robot

[SteamTrain]

Yeh...in this public forum we eventually hear of occasional problems like yours.

Imports from Vanguard, Fidelity, Chas Schwab and the big boys is usually flawless, and have only rarely heard of tax form import errors from any of them.

The use of PDF or picture uploads, the past year or two (only started 2 or 3 years ago), has been the source of many complaints.  I tend to recommend to Never do it that way....maybe ~5 years from now I'll try it a few times to see what happens, if they continue to offer that "feature". 

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[Bad-Robot]

Yep.  I learned my lesson, but I hope that TT learned that there QC needs substantial improvement to catch error from online uploads.  Implementing boundary checks and other simple checks should be easy based on the number of returns TT processes.  I did not use the .pdf or image.  This should have been an absolutely error free transmission.  I will be on my guard next year.  Hope they give me a free TT next year for these suggestions to improve QC.