Jonathan Kamens <
jik@kamens.us> wrote:
My wife and I didn't withhold enough from our salaries for
most of the year, and we use the withholding method rather
than the estimated taxes method to ensure that we pay enough
taxes before the end of the year, so we need to adjust our
withholding for the remaining paychecks until the end of the
year to make up the difference.
We use TurboTax, which fortunately has functionality for doing
this built in. However, after I enter all the numbers and
TurboTax spits out new W-4 forms for my wife and me to turn in
to our employers, there's a problem: line 4(a) on the forms,
the "Other income (not from jobs)" line, is negative.
Neither my employer nor my wife's will accept a negative value
for that line. Which makes sense, because how can you have
negative income from other jobs? I don't think the IRS
intended for there to be a negative value on this line, so I
think TurboTax is just completely borked to be doing this. I'd
be interested in hearing whether other people agree. Not that
it matters, I suppose, because Intuit is notoriously difficult
to give feedback to in any way that is likely to reach a human
who can do something about it, so even if I think TurboTax is
totally wrong here, it's unlikely that I can convince them to
change the program to do things differently.
As a workaround, we're taking the negative value from line
4(a) and entering it as a positive value on line 4(b)
("Deductions") in the online W-4 forms provided by our
employers. TurtoTax already put a value on that line, so we're
just adding the value TurboTax wanted us to put as a negative
on line 4(a) to the value already on line 4(b). What do people
think about that as a viable workaround?
Fill out a W-4 on paper. You know what the withholding allowances are
worth. Put in the additional withholding you want on the separate line
and give it to your payroll clerk.
If you get any income from investment funds that are required to
withhold, you can adjust withholding in one of these before the end of
the year.
If worst comes to worst, pay estimated taxes on January 15 although that
won't apply to the safe harbor required in the earlier three quarters.
There's still the option of filing From 2210, requesting a waiver of
penalty and interest, with the tax return. I've done that. For small
amounts IRS has let me slide.
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