"who will be paying our clients interest and penalty that may be charged when we have to amend returns to report this income that Proseries erroneously  missed?"

I'd think that would be the person whose signature is at the bottom of the 1040/8879.

That said, I absolutely agree that the Intuit communication was sorely lacking on this.  The November Alert said it would be fixed in December but to my recollection this was not fixed until January.  I don't know when it was fixed because there was no Alert informing folks 1) that it was fixed and 2) the steps they would need to take to ameliorate the problem.

It should not have happened to begin with.  Somehow Intuit has a nasty habit of breaking things that worked perfectly well in prior years.  Hey, stuff happens.  But they're a big enough company that they should have a well-staffed QC department to keep the stuff that happens behind closed doors rather than releasing it to their customers.  They were clearly aware of the problem in November, yet it took them well over a month to fix it.

The only "fix" was to the transfer-from-prior-year process, nothing was done regarding data files that had already been transferred.  While doing so certainly would have been difficult (arguably impossible under the current programming), it would not have been difficult to add a diagnostic (if transfer date < 1/xx/19 AND state refund wks box C2 is checked then trigger diagnostic warning).  Another alternative, there are already at least 3 check boxes I have to check on clients *every* year to "verify" that the information transferred over correctly.  Direct deposit info, ID info and the state ID number on every W-2 and 1099-R.  Those checkboxes are mandatory and flag a red error if they are not checked.  So they could have easily added a checkbox after the fact for the preparer to verify that the state tax refund transferred correctly.

Rick