Tax Payments Worksheet - Not Enough State Withholding Lines

[TimeForTaxes]

Hello,

I'm trying to enter all of the withholding I have from different states into TurboTax Premier desktop version and ran into a problem. 

Under "Step by Step", "Deductions and Credits", "Other income taxes", "Withholding not already entered on a W-2 or 1099", "State Withholding", the program only allows a user to enter up to three states. I need to enter more than three states.

Since Turbo Tax will let a user buy as many states as one wishes and enter estimated payments for as many states as one wishes, then Turbo Tax should also allow state withholding for up to 50 states.

Please add more lines to the Tax Payments Worksheet!

Above, I described how to enter the data using the "Step by Step" functionality. Using "View Forms", one would choose the Tax Payments worksheet, Line 18 a, b, c, "Other Withholding". I need more "Other Withholding" lines. The line 18 d "Positive adjustments" is not sufficient because I can't enter the symbol for numerous states on that line and that line won't feed through to the state forms. 

Additionally, I can't enter this withholding under estimated payments because (1) they are not estimated payments, and (2) it won't feed through to the correct lines on the state tax forms.

The only solution is for Turbo Tax to add more lines for state withholding.

Please update the program!

[jtax]

You make a good point.  Keep in mind that is largely a community forum. It might or might not get picked up by a TT employee. 

What was the additional withhold from if not from a 1099/W2? Is there anyway to indicate it where you entered the income?

A possible workaround would be to look at each state's tax payment worksheet. Glancing at one of mine reveals that there is area for "additional payments," which seem like it would work in your case. Being able to go directly to the forms, as you are doing, is very helpful for figuring this stuff out. It is a big advantage of using the desktop software.

If that doesn't work for you (or a particular state) or the payment winds up on the wrong line, then you might consider just finding the place for the withholding payments on each state return and overriding it. I would include a statement (click on the plus in forms mode when entering the amount) and clearly indicate what you are doing so the state authority is on notice.  That would mean federal TT doesn't know about the payment, so if you itemize and are under the $10k state income tax limit (very rare) you'll have to deal with that on the federal side.

Overriding is risky but is sometimes what you have to do in edge cases. Doesn't bother me if you understand it.

[TimeForTaxes]

The withholding is from state K-1s. And the forms very clearly indicate that it is withholding.

Clearly, TurboTax recognizes that withholding other than from W-2s and 1099s exists, otherwise the section to enter up to three states' other withholding wouldn't exist.  

I called last year and spoke to a rep. who promised something would be submitted to get this fixed. It never happened. I called this year and spoke to a rep. who promised something would be submitted to get this fixed. Instead, my support ID was closed out and nothing was fixed. When I called back many days later, I spoke to another rep. who also said something would be submitted to get this fixed. So far, nothing has happened. 

It's just a few lines of code. I don't understand why Turbo Tax keeps ignoring this.

[jtax]

Please note I am just a volunteer and not a TT/intuit employee.

I understand your frustration. You must be a software person. So you know that any software company has a very long to-do list. They have to prioritize. This particular issue likely does not effect very many people so it doesn't get a high priority. The reps you spoke to can't commit to a fix. They can just add it to the list or indicate another customer has the same issue.

Personally I have several things I'd like to see fixed in TT. But they haven't been fixed yet. Unfortunately that's the way it goes.

Will any of the work arounds I suggested work for you?

[TimeForTaxes]

Thank you for the response. Yes, I understand you're not a TurboTax employee.

I can always override the system, which is what I did last year. But after overriding, TurboTax doesn't let people e-file, so I then need to print off hundreds of pages of tax forms for lots of different states and mail them in. By doing that (1) TurboTax makes less money because I don't pay the e-file fees, (2) it's a ton more work for me, (3) my personal information is at risk traveling through the mail, (4) there's a higher likelihood of errors at the state level when processing the paper returns, and (5) it costs the states more money because they have to manually process the paper returns. 

By fixing the code, it's a win-win for everyone.

[jtax]

You make good points. But you are making assumptions that may not all be true. E.g. this costs TT net b/c of lost efile fees. This may effect so few people and their developer and test time may be expensive and the opportunity cost of fixing this may be large, so that it may not be net positive to them to fix it. 

Also I'm not sure you info is *more* at risk in the mail. Different risk, true. With all the zero-days being bought and sold these days your info may be safer on paper. And while the states do have to open the envelope, I suspect that these days most are just scanning a barcode printed by TT and tossing the paper. Or perhaps scanning the paper.

All that said I understand your frustration. As I said I have a few similar issues with TT that I think should be easy to fix. But they have other priorities.

[TimeForTaxes]

The fix will take any half-way decent coder 30 minutes. The code has already been written (they have three lines available today). They just need to add more lines. For that, they will get added revenue every single year moving forward. Over the long run, they'll probably make money by fixing this issue from me alone (I spend around $700/year on TurboTax services as of today, with a strong likelihood that will go up over the long run). Any additional person will be pure profit. In the partnerships I am in that generate the withholding, there are around 1,000 investors, all of whom fall into the same state filing requirements as me.

My opinion on the safety of mailing tax documents changed dramatically after one of my tax returns sent USPS went missing for months a couple of years ago, and after I never received a K-1 in the mail last year that the accountant swears she mailed.

[jtax]

Well perhaps we should both move on. But you are awfully quick to make absolute pronouncements about a code base you have never seen. Parts of the code base may be almost 30 years old. You say it would take 30 minutes to fix and that might be the case. But I can easily envision it to be much harder to change some fragile code. Hard-coded numbers, duplicated in multiple places, lack of test coverage for a niche feature, etc. Also they probably need to design the solution (add 47 more lines to the form as you suggest) or perhaps create a second form for the extras. What about the stuff that is below the current 3 entries ... would anyone would scroll down? Then they have to fix the tax payments worksheet, the interview, return review, and make sure the efile routines and all states pull out the right totals. Some code structures could make this a one-line change. Others might require substantially more effort.

My point is neither you or I know TT's development issues. We simply cannot make a statement like it'll be trivial to add 47 data fields. I choose to be humble about this kind of criticism. I wish TT (and other vendors) would get to my (seemingly easy to fix) issues but I have done this stuff and run development groups for a long time and know it is not always as easy as it looks from the outside. 

[DanielV01]

@jtax  Thank you for your understanding and patience.  Though I am not a coder, I do work with taxes themselves and know that a lot of calculations are inter-dependent of other calculations, and that is complicated further between both Federal and State tax issues (and all of the states are very different from one another).  This year has been especially challenging because of the abrupt law changes, some of which still have not yet been resolved fully at either the IRS/Federal or at many states' levels.  And yet, we are also aware of the customers' needs to have working software to process their returns.  Thank you for being understanding as we strive to take care of you also.

[ma59]

Thanks for you reply Daniel. I hope there is a way to get this fixed as it is impacting me too. Having me figure out how to manually update the state forms undoes a lot of the reason I bought TT and I really don't want to have to deal with mailing paper returns.

I have a software engineering background and written enough code to know that one can never guarantee that a "simple change" will in fact be simple since the code could be a messy can of worms but this change would hopefully be pretty simple. 

[StephenNied]

Yes, this is a huge issue for me year after year.  The overriding workaround works but should be totally unnecessary.  I agree with others this should not be difficult to code