I will never use Turbo tax again. My tax return was wrong and I owe IRS more and interest! Why did Turbo tax enter 'Excess social security and tier 1 RRTA tax withheld'?

[typeatile]

I received a notification from the IRS that my tax return had an error on it. I will not be using turbo tax again but would like to know what happened and how do I amend my return

[xmasbaby0]

You have not mentioned what tax year this is about.   Is it for a past tax year?   Did the IRS send you a letter? 

We cannot see your tax return(s) or access your account.

 If you filed a joint tax return, one common cause for this problem is if you put all of the income for both spouses under only one of your names.   The Social Security withheld from both spouse's W-2's shows up as an excess amount withheld for only one of you, and artificially inflates your refund.  When the IRS catches it, they bill you to get that refund back.    Is that what happened?

You should always save your own W-2’s for your records—now you need to look at them to check.  Look at your W-2 Box 4  What does it say?  Is it more than the maximum for the tax year?

2016  Maximum $7347      2017 Maximum $7886  2018 $7960.80

2019 $8239.80   2020  $8537.40

Check the worksheets from your tax return to see if you entered all of the W-2 income for both spouses under only one of the names on a joint return.  That is the most common reason for this problem.  Unfortunately, it is user error.  As you prepare your return, several screens alert you to it. 

And if you did in fact make the mistake of entering all of the income for your W-2’s under only one spouse’s name, you may have made that same mistake on the next year’s tax return if you transferred all your data over from the past year to the next.  Check to see—before you get another IRS letter.

On your 2020 return if you had excess Social Security it flows from Schedule 3 to line 31 of your Form 1040

[rjs]

A much less common situation that can cause incorrect excess Social Security tax to be shown on your tax return is that you mistakenly entered code A in box 12 of a W-2, instead of the correct code. Where this would appear on your tax return depends on what year it is. This is also user error.

Do not amend your tax return unless the IRS notice tells you to do that. It's probably not necessary. The IRS has already made the correction.

[Mike9241]

the usual reason is that one or more w-2's were coded as being the taxpayer's or spouse when they should have been indicated as being for the other spouse.  other possibilities are other entry errors. since your's seems to be the only thread reporting this it is likely the error is due to errors in entering the data. 

[philadopolis]

I think there may have been a bug. We filed as "married filing jointly." I assigned my wife's income to her and mine to me. TurboTax apparently calculated it all as belonging to one person, as it calculated that we paid excess social security tax. After I responded to an IRS 12C letter, there was many months of waiting and wondering. We finally received a notice that the IRS corrected our return. After a call to the IRS and lots of Googling, I calculated our SS withholding and discovered that the exact amount our refund was off was identical to our combined withholdings minus the maximum Social Security tax of $8,537.40. Individually, we were both under that amount. I won't rule out user error, but the fact that TurboTax documentation states that TurboTax calculates that for you leads me to believe that there was an error in the programming of the calculations.

[VolvoGirl]

Had to be user error.  The W2s got assigned to the same person.   Did you use the Desktop program?   You can open your return and check it.   For online if you download or print the pdf with all the worksheets it may say who the W2 was assigned to or not.

THEN for 2021 if you transfer over from 2020 you should delete ALL the W2s and re-enter them from scratch making sure to assign them to the right spouse.