I work for a guy who owns two separate CA-based companies, and I live in California and work the same job for both of them. For tax purposes, both of them are consolidated on my W-2 under a third-party payroll company, which has its own ID number in box b, along with its own name and address in box c. But I have two lines each for boxes 15-17, because the companies I work for have separate employer's state ID numbers in box 15.
The problem is that TurboTax won't let me input two separate entries with the same state for both of them. It tells me to delete a line, saying that "The state in box 15 should only appear once." But I can't do that. The reality is that I actually have two lines that start with "CA" on box 15 with two different ID numbers, and two different amounts each for boxes 16-17. I've previously filed the exact same way with TurboTax and had no issues, but it won't let me do it this year.
I've already paid the $89 and ran into this roadblock at the very end. Very frustrating. How do we get around this problem?
Either combine the two lines on one line, file an extension to allow time to resolve this reporting concern, or mail in the California return and attach the W2's.
You may want to alert the payroll company as well. States change their programming requirements regularly. When that happens, what worked for reporting one year might not another year. As such, the reporting agency may need to know this.
Ooh thanks, I got it! Instead of combining the two lines on one line, that gave me the idea to split them into separate W-2s. I had to do a bit of math, but it calculated perfectly and I ended up with the same income totals.
So what I did was I put my income on line 1 of box 16 (Company A) into boxes 1, 3, and 5. Then I found out that Company A is 22% of my original box 1 income, then I multiplied 0.22 into the box 2, 4, and 6 numbers, and I replaced those boxes with the reduced results. Then I did the same with my income on line 2 of box 15 (Company B, 78% of the total income) in order to get my proportionally split W-2s.
TurboTax seemed just fine with that, and it went through. Thanks!