Heads up on New York State (and perhaps other states) income tax electronic filing.

I cross posted this in General Discussion as well.

Every year I say that I'll never use Turbotax again, but every year my rage subsides and I end up using it anyway.

Went to file federal and state taxes on Turbotax. It would not let me electronically file. I had to mail them in by hand.

The cause of the electronic filing rejection was not apparent, so I spent almost the entire afternoon on the phone with Turbotax.

The problem had to do with New York State form IT-2, which is basically nothing more than a copy job of your W-2. I don't know how many states adopted this new form, but Turbotax FEDERAL was not prepared to deal with this new state form, so it disallowed me from filing BOTH federal and state returns electronically.

One more thing. When filing the NYS forms through the mail, the instructions stated that I had to file a summary form of my 1099's. However, Turbotax did not print out this summary form, even though it said it printed out all of the forms that were necessary to file my NYS return. So I had to Google the form, print it out, and literally copy the exact same information on my 1099's onto this form.

I think New York State is trying to eliminate the need for you to send in your actual W-2's and 1099's, so you have to regurgitate this information onto a form.

This is just a heads up in case you run into this problem. I have a feeling New York State is not the only state in which this will happen.

If you are using a tax software to file your federal and state taxes, and it won't let you file electronically, see if your state has W-2 or 1099 summary forms that must be completed. The problem probably lies with these forms, but the error may not be spelled out in the tax software.