Why am I getting two different outcomes on my W-2s?

[Kallenovsky]

Hi, I'm looking for advice on what might going wrong here. I started going through the free Turbo Tax edition, as I usually do because I rent and my taxes are simple, and I found that my W-2 will provide close to $2,000 in federal return and my wife's will take away so much that we'll owe a little over $100. I went to HR Block and filled in the exact same information and my wife's W-2 would have a $450 return and that mine would now cause us to owe around $50. I can't imagine how putting in the same information on two sites could have such drastic differences in what we owe. I also can't imagine how we owe anything. We've never owed taxes in the 13 years we've been together, I assume because of how much we chose to have taken out in taxes each paycheck. I'm not tax expert, but this is strange to me.

[BillM223]

I want to understand what you are saying.

You two are married? If so, you must file married filing joint or married filing separately.

If you file married joint, then all your W-2s go into the same tax return. You can't say that my wife's W-2 gave one refund and my W-2 gave another refund. For such a return, there is only one tax return and one refund (what you call a return).

You can choose to file married separately, but it is normally not a good idea, because a number of credits and deductions are not available to couples filing separate.

So please come back and describe how you are planning to file. Please understand that you do not file a W-2, you file a tax return, and all your forms are entered into that one tax return.

[Kallenovsky]

We always file jointly for the reasons you've mentioned. I'm saying that putting in both of our W-2s on two sites nets different outcomes when attempting to file jointly, despite the same information being entered.

[BillM223]

From rereading your post, it seems that when you enter both W-2s, the difference is that one service shows you owing $100 and the other owing $50. While I would expect them to be the same, there may be some variation in what you entered in the two websites.

As for entering one W-2 and seeing large disparities, there are so many variable about what you enter and the order in which you enter them, that it is probably not profitable to try to figure it out.

Your correct taxes will have both W-2s, so work only with that.

I do not know if you have copies of the 1040s for both services - you can see the 1040 on TurboTax even if you haven't paid for the product yet - but the thing to do is to compare the 1040s line by line until you find the discrepancy and see if the discrepancy can be explained by some variation in input (as it likely is).