UPDATE: As of today, August 25th, the IRS has not released any guidance for this payroll tax deferral.

Additionally, the National Payroll Reporting Consortium (NPRC) and American Payroll Association (APA) have sent recommendations to Treasury and IRS. To learn more about these, click NPRC Statement on Employee Social Security Tax Deferral and NPRC and APA Offer Recommendations to Treasury and IRS re Social Security Tax Deferrals

We are continuing to monitor this closely.

This post will be updated when more information is known.

Gina - it looks like the IRS has issued something late Friday.  The Journal of Accountancy published an article putting it in plain speak.   Looking forward to guidance on how to process in Sage 100.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-20-65.pdf

https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2020/aug/irs-payroll-tax-deferral-guidance.html

UPDATE: Guidance for the recent Executive Order was received late Friday. Sage is reviewing to determine next steps. Read about the guidance here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-20-65.pdf

We are aware that the IRS posted a draft revision of Form 941 and we are reviewing it as well. The Form 941 draft is posted here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/f941--dft.pdf.  

Any updates?

I have clients calling asking about how to handle this.  Especially Union shops!!

Do you mean they actually want to do it?  The only clients that have contacted me are the ones who specifically want to make sure that anything Sage does will NOT assume that they want to do it - they're pretty adamant about it.

The one particular client wants to do this for the Union employees only.  Not sure if they can do that for just some employees and not others... or how to do this in Sage.

My thoughts would be setup another tax profile (or set of tax profiles) to not calculate SS Taxes, but then how do we have the extra withheld next year?

Man, I hope those union employees understand about the "taking out twice as much next year" part...  That's "paying off the Christmas bills" time of the year.

I think the problem with setting up a new tax profile is the wages would be calculated as not taxable for FICA. They are still taxable, it’s just the tax is going to be deferred. Hoping Sage addresses this soon as the only way I can see at this point to implement this is to let the taxes calculate then go back into payroll data entry, pull up each entry, select the manual tax option and zero out the FICA withholding. Hopefully the new 941 will be editable so the deferred tax amount can be manually input. 

There may be some in this thread that are forgetting about the possibility of the entire deferral being forgiven. Our popularity-seeking congress members may not be willing to force the "double" deduction pay back unless they want to be seen as intentionally punitive (whether they are or not). Hey, in this political climate, anything can happen!

BUT all of that is completely irrelevant. If the law allows for it, the decision to take advantage of it lies with the employee (not the employer or the software developer) and Sage should be making the necessary revisions to its programs, pronto! Not just "monitoring the situation." Employers are paying for this service and should be able to process payroll in this manner for the employees that want it. If the funds have to be paid back later, then they pay it back later. And if that payback must be done through another payroll modification, as seems likely, then Sage would be wise to see this coming and be proactive about it.

I am working on my second payroll since this was put into place... any word when this programming will be complete?

UPDATE as of 9/11/2020:

We are currently working on programming for this to be included in Sage 100 Payroll 2.20.3, which is currently scheduled to be released by the end of September.

If you are offering your employee's this payroll tax deferral before our fix is released, we recommend doing the following:

1. Enter payroll as usual and then run tax calculation
2. Print out the Payroll Data Entry Audit Report (This is to have audit trail showing the employee’s Social Security tax amount they are choosing to defer).
3. You will then need to go back into Payroll Data Entry and for each applicable employee do the following:
   1. On the Header tab, select the Manual Taxes checkbox
   2. Click Taxes button
   3. Zero out the amount in the Soc Sec Tax field (Note: this is the tax amount that will be deferred).
4. Run Tax Calculation again
5. Proceed as usual

• Until we release our enhancement for this, we suggest creating a spreadsheet or some way to keep track of each employee’s deferred social security tax. Then after you have installed Sage 100 Payroll 2.20.3, you will be able to manually enter each employee’s year-to-date Social Security Tax Deferred amount in Sage 100.

NOTE: The IRS emphasized the employee social security tax deferral postponement is optional and while nothing bars an employer from considering employee input, the employer remains the "Affected Taxpayer" and is not required to use the relief even upon an employee's request.