And today I received my confirmation that my federal tax return had been accepted, so I went to file my Pennsylvania income tax.

This year the commonwealth has something called MyPath and I think it may very well be a bit easier than their previous web sites were. At least I didn’t have some of the major problems that I had last year trying to get a copy of my tax form.

But there are still a few kinks.

One annoyance occurred while entering the information for my OPM 1099R form. One of the fields that MyPath asked for is the phone number on the form, and it’s a required field; one can’t get past that screen without filling in that bit of data.

Alas, OPM does not supply that data on their 1099R. This was not a problem with the federal tax form as the field was not required.

I briefly considered filling in a bogus number such as 999-999-9999, but then I decided that might cause problems, so I opted to fill in my phone number. Should anyone at the PA internal revenue office call it, I can always explain.

There was a more serious problem, however.

I had gotten to the end of the process and was told that I’d be getting a refund, when I realized that I hadn’t entered my Social Security info, so I doubled back to figure out where to plug it in.

I thought I found the place and clicked Add to add the form when I realized that the form numbers didn’t match up and what’s more, there was no need to enter the information because it’s not taxable anyway in Pennsylvania so that’s probably why they weren’t asking for it. 

Duh!

So I clicked what I thought was the back button but it turned out to be the Abort button and I ended up losing all my work!

I had to start all over again.

I left feedback explaining that their messages could be a bit clearer.

In the event, it only took me about ten minutes to repeat the whole process, so it wasn’t too much time wasted.

The good news is I’ll be getting a modest refund from both the feds and the commonwealth this year.