It’s a Louisiana thing, I have to file a Non-Resident return and pay Louisiana taxes on my SERP retirement income which is paid and reported on a W2. A few years after I started receiving my SERP payments my ex-employer contacted me to say that the IRS have told them that I should also be paying payroll taxes (FICA and Medicare) on that SERP income, which I now do.
When we moved to England a few years back I updated my address in England with Vanguard but made the mistake of putting our daughter’s address as a correspondence address. Vanguard allows this and it is clear on their website that your street address is where you reside. The year after I made my first Roth conversion while living here Vanguard must have sent a copy of my 1099-R to the California department of revenue who came after me for State taxes. I had to prove that I didn’t reside in California that year, and that Vanguard was not a Californian company.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/serp.asp
The bolded sounds weird to me. I thought only earned income from a job was reported via W-2 and all other income (pension, etc...) was reported via 1099. Weird that Louisiana does it different. Maybe some other states do also.
For much of our military careers we were stationed in CA. We were actual residents (drivers license) for a couple of years. We left CA for MD in 2009 (orders) but kept the house. CA of course was trying to get us to pay income tax. Nope. Just property there CA. Was easy to prove we weren't there.
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