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Solved

Why does the review of my taxes show "Dividend Income Worksheet: Payer has too many characters."

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
February 9, 2024
17 replies
0 views

In the final review before submitting my Iowa taxes, I get a prompt telling me that the Dividend Income Worksheet has too many characters, and it's highlighting the suffix field - which is blank. It appears that it's pulling the information on the state information worksheet from the Personal Worksheet on the federal side (which is also blank in this field).

I cannot submit my taxes to the state with this error - turbotax will not let me proceed until the error is fixed, but there are no characters typed into the suffix field to make it have "too many characters"

TurboTax Online

Best answer by huntdan

mine was a vanguard issue, go into your dividend section and shorten the vanguard name.

Beagle60

I have the same problem. The field is blank but the program thinks there is something in the field. Turbo Tax needs to fix this immediately.

darthchickenAuthor

Glad I'm not the only one! I saw a fix came through today, but it wasn't this one unfortunately. Still stuck!

mlblaker

I have the same issue with the Iowa state return. I'll guess I'll have to wait to see how to resolve this issue before I can file my taxes.

Ender1337

The Iowa Information Worksheet is giving me troubles on the field for my suffix (which is blank since I don't have a suffix in my name). Is that where you're seeing it?

klroehr

Yes-for some reason it highlights the suffix part of the information page, but you actually need to go into the dividend forms and shorten fund/payer names-completely different form than what it shows highlighted. It’s frustrating, but I’m glad that’s all it took! Good luck!

huntdanAnswer

mine was a vanguard issue, go into your dividend section and shorten the vanguard name.

darthchickenAuthor

I just spent about an hour on the phone with a very helpful and patient Intuit employee, who saw your post as we were talking. In my case, it was Fidelity - but same issue. Fidelity goes by "National Financial Services LLC", shortening the name to "National Financial Services" on the 1099-DIV form fixed the error.

Iowadog

The individual who pointed out that National Financial Services has too many characters on the 1099 DIV form is correct! We have wasted days trying to figure this out and we shortened the payer name as suggested, and the problem was solved. In the spirit of recognizing someone who actually solved the problem, I suggest that user get free Turbo Tax services for a period of five years. This was a problem in the Iowa Tax return completeness review. Turbo Tax should get on it immediately!!!!!

gingerfox

"Morgan Stanley Capital" was the winner for mine which shortened it substantially.

jackmichele

This exact error from turbo tax happened to me. The fix : 1st- go to your forms and select the fed. dividend form--I only had one div. form from 'Financial Services...' which I deleted that name and put in 'fidelity' only. Then I went back to state e-file and it transmitted the return!! It e-filed the state return after I finally figured out that it was the dividend form with" too many characters ". I changed the payer name to a shorter name. Right or wrong it worked. It was turbo taxes fault because it 'auto-filled' that "too many characters" name!! Mike

MJH10

Like those above my error says "Error payer name on a dividend worksheet is blank. But the Review sheet that is shown is the Information Worksheet and the suffix box is highlighted rather than a Dividend worksheet. The payer name on the dividend worksheet is NOT blank. And the payer name is NOT too long. And I have cleared the suffix field on the Info worksheet using the delete and backspace keys.

MJH10

UPDATE: I worked over the phone with a TT rep for 1 1/2 hours. She could not solve the problem. She said she thought it is an error in the programming code and that she would escalate the problem to the next level of support. When I asked what the "case number" would be for the escalation, she said it was the same one that she and I had. BUT after the call was finished I received an email from TT asking me to complete a survey about how the call went. And that email said the case had been CLOSED. Also, I have searched all the forms included in my return and could not even find a form precisely titled "Dividend Income Worksheet".

BellvueBD

Same issue with my Iowa state tax return.

MJH10

Please see my last UPDATE for a possible solution to your problem.

DocHeartless1

I can confirm with an Iowa return, that it wound up being the Dividend worksheets. I changed my 'Charles Schwab Co & Inc' and 'Vanguard Marketing Company Fiduciary Company' down to 'Schwab' and 'Vanguard.' It went through no problem after that change. Bizarre that it looks like it has to do with the Suffix portion of your name, but it's really some totally different worksheet.

MJH10

Thanks Docheartless1 for confirming that shortening the payer name solved the issue for you. In my case it was the same error message but the error was generated because on one of my 1099-Div there were 0.00s in various boxes and TT doesn't accept that. TT wants the boxes left blank. Besides giving a totally wrong error message (which TT needs to fix) I would like to point out that when TT imports the data from a financial institution, TT ALLOWS the name to be too long when it is imported (instead of automatically shortening it), AND it only throws an error way later when your getting ready to e-file. The same thing with the 0.00s. They were put into the boxes by the import not by me, but again TT allows the import to enters 0.00s instead of making the boxes blank. And again it doesn't throw the error until much later in the process. TT really needs to clean up their sloppy programming.

RichRinCR

I, too, ran into this problem. Guessing many, MANY Iowa taxpayers are, too.

This is idiotic. You'd think the process would tell us WHERE the problem is but, it doesn't. It throws a form in the window which appears to be unrelated to the error.

The ONLY reason I came to TurboTax this year is because H & R Block's Iowa software is a cluster****. Apparently, TurboTax is just a different kind of cluster****. Neither one leaves me with any confidence that either is better than the other.

KevinMichelle

It's simply absurd that today, after my husband spent almost 2 hours with 3 different employees of this company, none of them had an answer for him. The advice offered was simply to start the Iowa State Taxes over again or simply submit it without that final check. Quick note - we buy your product to use ALL the tools to be sure we are filing correctly - but, yeah, let's just skip that last part. Great advice!

When I arrived home from work to find my husband frustrated over this, he took me through the issue and we tried a couple of things but it still showed the same error. I decided to type the error into my search engine and this discussion was first in my results! We fixed the error in less than ten minutes!

Hey, Intuit/TurboTax - this issue was posted on YOUR community forums site over a month ago! And, the answer to the problem is RIGHT HERE! You should be ashamed one of your customers had to figure out the answer and further humiliated that no one from your company could do a search and find the answer here, like many of us have done. (Btw, thank you to everyone who posted here to help others looking for help.)

Not only is your software not working properly, but your resources for help are not either. If this is just an Iowa problem - everyone in Iowa who used your product for filing should be reimbursed the price of the software.

And, yes, I am well aware this message will never be read by anyone from the company. Up to this date, it's quite clear no one from the company has read any of these messages - otherwise the support center would be aware of the issue and know how to fix it. - But, I feel better for having written this.

Frustrated in MN

I currently have this same error message, for an out-of-state Iowa filing, but shortening the National Financial Services LLC name down in the Dividend Worksheet has not cleared the issue. I have gone through this multiple times, with all sorts of short combinations, and have quickly stepped through the Federal and then Iowa state forms to see if that would allow it to recognize the updated field. Looking through all the previous posts, I also made sure there were no zeros entered into blank fields. I am at a loss at this point. SMH

Frustrated in MN

I forgot to mention - this issue only shows up for my Iowa state taxes, Minnesota state taxes have no issue. However it is still preventing me from completing my e-filing of everything today

katiepotter2016

It wouldn't link or highlight on a page anywhere what was wrong, just said "Dividend Income Worksheet". So I shortened the name by a ton of characters on the federal form, deleted the Iowa form, then had redo the entire state form for it to finally work. Huge pain and definitely a TurboTax and Iowa problem that other people aren't having to deal with.