Hidden Fed to State: Employer Name has too many characters

[tkrohn623]

I am unable to file my taxes electronically because of this error

"Hidden Fed to State: Employer Name has too many characters"

There is no link to show where to fix this error and there is not a way to shorten my employer's name. Please advise. 

[JulieS]

Yes, that error is related to the employer name from your W-2. There are a few states that limit the number of characters for the employer's name to a lower number than the federal limit. 

The number of characters is limited to 35 (including spaces) and the only special character allowed is the hyphen ( - ). 

You will need to remove any commas, periods, and other special characters form the employer's name and abbreviate, or cut off the end of the name. Just make sure the first four letters match your W-2 form exactly.

To edit your W-2 in TurboTax Online:

1. Open your return.
2. Select Federal, then Wages & Income.
3. To the right of Job (W-2), select Edit/ Add.
4. Expand the section by selecting the down arrow to the right
5. Select Edit below the W-2 information.
6. Edit your W-2 information here, then select Continue.
7. Select Continue to return to the Wages & Income screen. 
    

[keyboardmash]

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.