Tax Schedule report includes W-2 wages, but I had no wages!

Question

I've been retired, and have had no salary income, for years.  Yet I just generated a Tax Schedule report for 2022 and the report includes a section for "W-2 > Salary or wages, self".  It seems to relate to a 401(k), only I don't have a 401(k) anymore.  See the attached screenshot.

I have searched Quicken for the amount 82.90 and for the particular dates involved and see nothing that correlates.  And when I scan my Categories that are associated with this tax reporting (e.g., Salary, Bonus, etc.), none of them have any activity for the period.

Anyone got a clue?

lwoodquick · Answer

No, it does not let me click.  In fact, those are the only lines in the Tax Schedule report that aren't clickable.  And I verified that there were no corresponding transactions in the corresponding 401(k) accounts, hidden or not.

I did finally track this down, by searching for "82.90" in the Quicken search box, and found a set of split transactions that correlated with these dates.  But what's weird is that the 82.90 was charged to a particular Utilities sub-category -- nothing to do with wages or 401(k) or anything close to that -- and no, that category did not have any tax line item associated with it.  I verified that this was the corresponding transaction by changing the amount to something different (81.67) and sure enough that showed up in the Tax Schedule report.  So this just seems to be a Quicken bug.  And thanks for the tip about how to get a view into the pseudo-category "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts", that was useful.  It didn't explain why this was happening, but at least I could see that the issue was limited to only those transactions, and it's no longer occurring in 2023.

My workaround was to go through these 7 lines and change the subcategory to a different one, and poof, these rows disappeared from the Tax Schedule.

Thanks to both of you for your responses!

mshiggins · Answer

When was the 401(k) account closed? Were you transferring money out of the 401(k) account during 2022?

The Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts is a special pseudo account Quicken uses to track the reduction of your wage AGI due to 401(k) contributions you have made. The trick for accessing the pseudo account is the create a transfer transaction in any account to the Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts account, then click Edit | Go to Matching Transfer. Once in the pseudo account, you can delete the 2022 year transactions. Backup first, in case the results are not what you expected.

While you are in the pseudo account, check if there are transactions for 2023. That would indicate whatever caused the 2022 transactions is still occurring.

MontanaKarl · Answer

Does it not let you click on one of the 82.90 transactions to jump to the corresponding register entry?

If you no longer have a 401(k)…which seems to be where this is from… I have to imagine that you have a scheduled transaction to make that deposit every month and need to delete that.  If your old 401(k) account is hidden, you'll have to go into the list of accounts to show it and delete those incorrect transactions.