Utah State Return says my employer ID is not 14 digits when what I have entered is precisely 14 digits.

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
February 3, 2021
4 replies
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I am filing my Utah state tax return and the automatic check tells me I have to review some info from my W-2's. The error states: "Form TC-40W (1): Payer ID must be 14 characters long without hyphens, you must go back to federal W-2 or 1099 to update the employer/payer state withholding ID" I have entered all of the Employer State ID's exactly as they are written on my W-2's. I have double checked the numbers that were provided to me and they each have 14 characters (I have multiple w-2's). I have also tried re-entering all of my w-2's 100% manually and still nothing will allow me to continue.

Can someone please help me figure out why turbotax thinks I have the incorrect information when I am 100% sure I have the correct info?

To be honest this has given me enough of a headache already and I would love to just give up on filing state through turbotax but with the federal free file transaction, turbotax will not allow me to stop doing state taxes through them. It makes me file both at the same time.

TurboTax Free Edition Online

KatrinaLO

Please see below for more information about this error:

https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/state-taxes/discussion/form-tc-40w-1-payer-id-error-in-utah/00/1088253

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WilliamyumAuthor

@KatrinaLO

I have tried everything on the thread you sent me (I actually had found that thread previously) and nothing is working. When it has me review the information there is no box that I can type in. It just shows the full form with a note next to the box I need to change. The note is as follows: "H 14 characters, no hyphens". The error specifically states I have to go back to my federal return info to change it but nothing happens when I do.

Let me know if there is anything else you can think of that might fix the issue.

Thanks,
Will

SteamTrain

Employee

@Williamyum

....one person has indicated that it works if you use lower case "wth" letters at the end.

have no idea if this is a general thing, or just a random thing.......Please post back if that works for you

____________*Answers are correct to the best of my knowledge when posted, but should not be considered to be legal or official tax advice.*

WilliamyumAuthor

@SteamTrain

Hi thank you for your input. I have tried entering all of my w-2's with lowercase letters but nothing has changed.

Thank you for trying to help though.

WilliamyumAuthor

Hello all,

I just solved this myself. I went through all of my w-2's again and one of them was missing a number. I fixed that but was still getting the error. This error shows all of your w-2's AND 1099's and I didn't think to check the unemployment form I received, which is a 1099. I must have typed the State Identification number wrong on that form because as soon as I re-entered it, smart check didn't find any errors.

So turns out it was user error on my part.

Thanks again to those that tried to help!

-Will

memurgency

This exact thing just happened to me. Thank you so much for figuring it out. I was able to go back and find my own mistake (it was 1 "-" that had been left in the number on my W2.

Grrr.... hours of frustration and headaches.

WendyN2

This W2 inaccuracy can also happen due to the control number on your W2 being invalid. Therefore, if you are to run into this and it is not "user error", please make sure the information has in fact been uploaded completely and accurately. If not, delete it out and manually re-enter the information.

Chemistryman62

I ran into the same problem. My W-2s were correct, but I discovered a 1099R that had the state abbreviation then a "-", so I removed those, and that fixed the error. So if your W-2s are correct, double check any 1099s to make sure there are only 14 characters in the box. You're welcome.

incoda

Employee

I checked what I could, everything looked correct... it's possible that TurboTax imported something from a previous year that choked, or the company I did sidework for had something off, I couldn't tell.

If it happens again next year, and I still see nothing wrong with the form values, I won't be using TurboTax.

At bare minimum, TurboTax needs to actually show the problem, not just the error with the correct-looking value and nothing on the page to click directly to change it (it should at least link to the form with the problem so I can edit the value, rather than me having to hunt down in a forest of links trying to find it). This is 100% a UI/UX problem on TurboTax's end, whether the error or value is correct or not.