My employer did not remove HSA contributions (W2 Box 12W) from Wages in boxes 1, 3, and 5. What do I do?

[dmertz · Accepted solution]

Only if your employer believed that your HSA contributions were not excludible from your income should your employer not have excluded the code W amount from the amount in boxes 1, 3, and 5 of your W-2.  If the employer had no reason to believe that the HSA contributions were not excludible from your income and mistakenly did not reduce your box 1, 3 and 5 amounts by the code W amount, contact your employer to obtain a corrected W-2.

Otherwise, you'll need to treat the code W amount as being a personal HSA contribution rather than a contribution made through your employer.  In the HSA portion of the interview, on the Let's enter your HSA contributions page, TurboTax will show the code W amount as employer and payroll contributions.  Enter this same amount as a contribution that you personally made.  Click Continue, then enter in the box for Employer and payroll contributions not reported in box 12 of your W-2 a negative entry to cancel out the amount TurboTax is treating as the employer amount to be reported on Form 8889 line 9.  You'll end up with a zero on Form 8889 line 9 and a deduction on Form 1040 line 25.  There's a chance that the IRS will question the claiming of a deduction for the code W amount, so be prepared to provide explanation, if need be.

[MinhT]

Code W in box 12 reports both the amount of your employer's contributions to your HSA and the employee's contributions . These employer's contributions are in addition to your wages. The amount is not deducted from your wages reported in boxes 1, 3 and 5.

The deductibility of the total contributions to your HSA depends on your answers to the questions in the TurboTax HSA interview.

[ptrj47]

In my case The amount in box 12w is the amount of my contribution ($5000) -  the employer did not contribute to the HSA. If I follow turbo tax instructions the total amount I contributed to the HSA will be taxed since the contribution was not subtracted in box 1, 3 & 5 of the W2. I think the employer should have subtracted the $5000 from Box 1,3,5.

[MinhT]

The deductibility of your contributions is determined by your answers in the HSA interview in TurboTax.

[ptrj47]

The HSA interview in Turbo Tax does not help - W2 Box 12W is $5000 all of which was employee contributions by me. It appears that turbo tax assumes that the employer has subtracted the employees HSA contribution from Boxes 1,3 &5 of the W-2. The only way I can make it work so that I am not taxed on the $5000 that I contributed is to reduce the Boxes 1,3,5 of the W2 by $5000 which would not be appropriate since I would be changing numbers reported to the IRS.