peterkim blog

I actually finished my taxes a couple of weeks ago but I received a package from the New York state tax folks a few days ago saying there was a problem with my tax return. The total local tax withholding amount reported on my main tax form did not equal the sum of the local tax withholding amounts on my W-2 forms. I looked on the W-2 summary form and for some reason, TaxCut did not fill in the local tax withholding data for my current employer’s W-2.

This is strange because the local tax withholding data from being filled in properly for the wife’s W-2. And yes, I made sure that I entered “NYC” as the locality name.

I called tech support and within a few minutes of talking to the lady, I knew she wasn’t going to be of any help to me. So while I was on the phone with her listening to her blabber about different things I should try, I put my brain in software developer’s mode and tried to figure out where the software could have screwed up the logic.

I think I tried one or two things before I came up with this idea: this particular W-2 has two state’s withholding info in addition to the local tax withholding. So I thought maybe I should try swapping the positions of the state withholding info. Previously, I had MA listed first, then NY second. I changed it so NY was first and MA was second… and it worked! The local tax withholding then transferred to the state W-2 summary form properly.

It turns out the (faulty) TaxCut logic does the following:

if (”NY”.equals(stateWithholdingLine1))
    fillInLocalTaxWithholding();

instead of:

for (state : stateWithholdingLines) {
    if (”NY”.equals(state)) {
        fillInTaxWithholding();
        break;
    }
}

I explained the problem to her and suggested that she file a bug report. She was like “what’s that?”