Wisconsin TurboTax Users: Heads Up

Just a friendly notice for those of you who use TurboTax. I seem to have uncovered a bug with its handling of WEIC (Advanced Income Credit.)

On your W2, box 14: "Other." My employer lists the money withheld, pre-tax to pay things like health insurance premiums. For the sake of round numbers and privacy, we'll pretend that number is $1,000. Box 14 reads:
"PRE TAX 1,000.00"

On Wisconsin Form 1, line 37, the instructions are (from page 28 of the instructions) "Fill in the amount of Wisconsin advance earned income
credit payments you received in 2009. These payments are
identified as WEIC in box 14 of FormW-2."

Well, turbotax takes the $1,000 listed as PRE TAX and is throwing it on line 37! The behavior seems to be blindly taking any number listed in W2, box 14 and throwing it on Form 1, line 37, regardless of label.

Why does this matter? Line 37 is tacked on to your tax bill! (Again, fake, round numbers here) This takes my total tax owed the the state from $3000 to $4000 or for those who count by refund, the difference between having to send in a check for $500, to getting a refund of $500.

I have contacted their tech support to file a bug and hopefully they took my report as such. I'll know more Monday. Apparently, I have to wait to talk to the Macintosh department. (Seems foolish to me. A bug of this nature seems likely to be in the 'engine' that would likely be cross-plaftorm. This is not UI related, as far as I can tell.)

Just a heads up--you might want to wait to file those state taxes!

Can you just overide it?

I usually wait to file until April because we owe something for one reason or another seemingly no matter what we do throughout the year. But even if by miracle of miracles they owe us this year I'll probably still wait at least a bit because there are always updates to download.

I used computer Tax programs for several years. I thought they were working OK. Then they couldn't handle things like kids in college. One year the software said I owed over $1,000. And I did everything right.

For a hundred bucks, I went to a professional and his return got me a refund. And by the time I bought the software and paid for the state package, I thought it was overpriced. I've heard about many issues similar to what Matt is reporting.

So I now just go to a pro. If there's an error, it's up to him to fix it. I know a lot of people get good results with tax software. It just wasn't working for me.