TurboTax doesn't believe no state income tax?

April 15, 2012 4:40 PM

How does TurboTax figure the "Other income taxes" line? Or, how can I correct this?

I'm doing my taxes with TurboTax this year (my first time with TurboTax). I'm in the Deductions and Credits part, and I've double-checked everything. In the "Estimates and Other Taxes Paid" section is a line titled "Other Income Taxes." When I click to learn more, it is defined as state income tax.

I do not live in a state with state income tax. Instead, we take off the sales tax which is handled on another line. I selected "None of the above" and TurboTax entered a number. This number is exactly the number of federal withholding tax.

Now what? I get that I'm completing the Schedule A on this part, but I don't know how to get TurboTax to accept that my federal withholding was not state income tax (and state income withholding is not completed in the Federal Taxes section). I've googled and only found other people with the same question, but no answers.

posted by Houstonian to work & money (2 answers total)

Whoops, I was prematurely hysterical. I don't know why that shows up on that line (very alarming), but the last, summary page has it all correct.
posted by Houstonian at 4:55 PM on April 15, 2012

Tax programs have all sorts of bugs like this, especially the type you noted, where the display or some other 'superficial' item is wrong at some point but the actual final number submitted is correct. And the bugs are far more numerous early in the tax season. They do a massive amount of cleanup and bug fixes as the tax season progresses. FYI this comes about because they have to basically re-program a huge, complex system each and every year on a very tight schedule and (most usually) as Congress & the IRS are changing all sorts of things around mid-stream.

My point is, if you haven't updated to the latest version, you might try that.

[Speaking as the SO of someone who worked on similar tax software for a major company for many years.]
posted by flug at 6:54 PM on April 15, 2012