Payroll Tax - empty "State Worked" field. Why is this optional? Why cant you report exceptions?

Grant Owen
Grant Owen Member Posts: 9
edited February 2017 in Payroll Premier
Hi everyone,
I am just a small one-person company, but in labour hire, so lots of employees going through the payroll. My payroll officer is learning as she goes.
I am undergoing a payroll tax audit and my payroll officer did not know that the state field in the address and the state field for payroll tax ("state worked") were not the same. Some are set up with "state worked" and some are not. Hence I have workers earning money who do not appear in the monthly payroll tax report, but do appear in the monthly payroll totals report, which does not include the "state worked" field. So there is a discrepancy but no clue to why.
I have rung Reckon asking for a report that shows this field so I can identify employees who are not allocated to a state for payroll tax purposes so I can
1...at least remedy this error from today and
2...reconcile the two discrepant reports
but Reckon advise that they cannot produce such a report. Seems like one that would be useful in any payroll audit.
I now have to go through my employees one by one to check this field. And any change I make is effective from today, so I cannot go back and force my reports to agree, nor reconcile them. Furthermore if an employee changes "state worked" and I make the change there appears to be no record of when the change occurs, so in future if a "state worked" field is changed on the wrong day, or late, I will never be able to find the error.
Not very satisfactory. Surely Reckon should not let you set up an employee without the state tax field being given a value? And surely you should be able to run a report that shows which states the employee worked in with start and finish dates.
Any suggestions?........ Grant

Comments

  • John G
    John G Reckon Staff Posts: 1,570 Reckon Staff
    edited February 2017
    Hi Grant,

    Thanks for the post.

    I too have not been able to find a report that will give what you are after.
    I'll put this post in the Ideas section for our developers to take into consideration in their development cycle.

    The solution is to mark the Employee Record correctly for Payroll Tax and then refresh all the relevant pays.  Don't forget that payroll items must be activated for Payroll Tax inclusion as well.  

    For past periods you will have to manually calculate payroll tax amounts as Reckon Accounts only uses current rates.  You can work off the Employee address - add the employee State field (off his normal address) onto a Payroll Totals report and run off the emplyees for that state and period and see the totals (assuming they live and work in the same state).  Then refer to that state's Office of State Revenue website and get the threshholds and rates for the periods involved and export to excel to calculate the Payroll Tax amount there.   

    Hopefully this will get you the numbers you need for now.  


    regards,
    John.