Probably not until 2018.  If you recall in 2011 when Obama was in office, Congress passed a law to reduce Social Security to 4% for Employees while leaving the employer portion at 6%.  This happened between Christmas and New Years in a lame duck session when Sage was pretty much shut down for the Holidays.  Sage had just released the update for the New Year when this happened. This caused massive problems with software calculations, reports & forms while costing Sage and Certified Consultants a lot of money.  

The following year, when it was set to be rescinded, Sage released the update for the New Year turning everything back.  The next day, Congress met and decided to let it ride for another year.   

In year three, Sage released the Tax updates after the law was rescinded and it crashed with a Microsoft update!   This created another year of chaos.  Soon after that, Sage slimed the Sage 50 portfolio from 8 products to 3.  Pro, Premium & Quantum and added Sage Support to anyone using  the Sage 50 Payroll module.

Hence that is why you must now be in the current version of Sage 50 if you are using connected services. 

Shirley Byard,   Sage 50 Certified Consultant.

There has never been a time when they haven't released the January payroll tax service in December.

Most years they release two January services one in December and another sometime in January.

With the changes at Sage it is now impossible to run a payroll without a tax service.

Any payroll changes relative to the current tax act assuming it gets passed before year end will not take effect until at least February so there is little reason to hold up the January tax service.

My biggest complaint with the way Sage does business now is they used to keep us informed about release dates.

With the outsourcing of support not only has service suffered greatly but they are also uniformed about what is going on.

As a certified consultant what are you going to tell your clients that have paid for a tax service that they are not going to be able to process payroll come 2018?

No one else has ever asked me.  Sage will have it in time for the January 1st payroll. 

Never say never.  Congress passed laws that affected payroll calculations 2 years in a row between Christmas and New Years.  Why couldn't that happen again? 

The 1st January 2018 payroll tax update should start releasing to customers later today. Once we have released it you can obtain it by going to Services, Check for Updates, and selecting Check Now.

Thanks for the reply.  Makes my job a whole lot easier when Sage is sharing information with us