1. Home
  2. Taxes General Forum
  3. Sum of state wages (box 16) is a lot more than federal wage (box 1)

Sum of state wages (box 16) is a lot more than federal wage (box 1)

I live in IL. My office is in IL and work as a consultant in CA. I have received two W2 forms showing $70,000 federal wage (box 1) on both of them. However, on one W2 it shows $70,000 wage (box 16) in IL and on the other one it shows $50,000 wage (box 16) in CA. I actual earned only $70,000 in 2014 and the total state wage is $12,000.

Reporting CA state tax return is easy, just using NR status. The problem is reporting IL state tax. Its Schedule CR does not allow me to report $50,000 CA wage in column B because $50,000 is also included in IL wage. This prevent me from taking the credit of CA state tax.

Can anybody tell me how to report IL state tax to take state tax credit paid to CA?

Thanks a lot.

Jeff Chang Chicago, IL

Reply to
Jeff
Loading thread data ...

It appears from your post that you had $70K of wages in 2014. $50K of those wages were earned for services performed in CA. The other $20K was earned for services performed in IL. As an IL resident you must report the whole $70K as IL state wages. The Schedule CR is used to compute the ratio of CA income to IL income to be used to calculate the IL credit. You state you are prevented from doing this. I must assume you are using tax software to do this. We have no idea what software you are using nor do we know how you may have entered the data into that software.

I can only tell you that Line 1 Col A of the CR should have $70K and Line 1 Col B should have $50K. If you would post the name of the software you are using and how you actually entered the data from your W-2s into that software, there may be a member of this forum familiar with that software that can tell you how to proceed. The only thing I can tell you in a worst case scenario, is to use your software's field over-ride capability to enter $50K in Col. B.

Reply to
Alan

responding to

formatting link
Jeff wrote: I used MyTax Illinois provided by the state of Illinois to file state tax. First, I entered numbers from W2: $70,000 for both federal wages and IL wages. When working on Sch CR, I put $70,000 in Line 1 Col A and $50,000 (earning from CA) in Line 1 Col B. It immediately showed a message that result of Line 1 Col A minuses Line 1 Col B cannot be less than the IL wages reported on W2. The only way to eliminate this error is to put $0 in Line 1 Col B, which means I cannot take the state tax I paid to CA as credit.

I then downloaded the instruction of Sch CR to figure out why. The instruction for Line 1 Col B says "Do not include wages taxed by another state if they are also shown as Illinois wages." Since $50,000 I earned while working in CA is also shown as IL wages, I cannot report it. In this case, the same wages, $50,000, get taxed by 2 states.

Could you let me know what will be the right way of filing IL state tax to get the tax credit of CA?

Thanks,

Jeff Chang

Reply to
Jeff

BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.