Payroll taxes

Question

Employee had the wrong state taxes deducted, how do I go back and change them for checks that have already been issued and posted?

Art Minds · Answer

As you know, deductions affect the Net Pay on a check, so you can't really change a deduction on a prior check without EITHER changing the Net Pay (which you wouldn't want to do, since the check has most likely already been deposited or cashed), or make the correcting entry to another Deduction ID (either positive or negative) to keep the Net Pay amount the same. You could use a Deduction ID such as "Employee Advance" and with future checks either refund the amount to the employee or deduct it from the employee's future checks until the amount is fully recovered. 
 
Another alternative is to manually calculate the accumulated net differences in the state tax deduction for the prior checks and manually adjust the state tax deduction on one or more future checks until the YTD state tax deduction is where you would like it to be.

Jesse Gordon · Answer

Hi Brendav, 
 The issue is twofold - one problem is the wrong state taxes were withheld from the employee - this is easily fixed by entering a correction 0 check with a negative tax amount for one tax ID and a positive for the other. 
 The other issue is that if the state tax withheld be wrong, it is likely that the wages accrued to the wrong state as well, and we want to check employer taxes as well. This may require you to void the checks to correct. 
 If you have a Silver Care or Gold care support plan, you may want to call in to support to review your setup to both fix this issue and prevent it from happening in the future. 
 You can review article 21201 in the Sage Knowledgebase for more information. 
 Hope this helps!

Art Minds · Answer

Brenda, 
 
As Jesse correctly pointed out below, the wrong state taxes were calculated and deducted because the EARNINGS were reported to the wrong state. At the end of the quarter, when you go to file your state payroll returns, the system will want to report those wrong state earnings to that state, and your correct state earnings will be underreported, and there will be a mis-match between the earnings reported to each state and the amounts of tax withholding. That's the reason you have to correct the earnings/time entries to have them report to the correct states. The state taxes will calculate correctly, but for each check you will have very likely have to manually adjust the automatically calculated state tax withholding to the amount actually withheld on the check issued with the "wrong" state earnings. If your "time entry view" doesn't show a column for "state" (either in time entry or under Tasks > Enter Checks), you will need to customize a time entry view to show the state column so you can correctly adjust the earnings to the correct state. I would recommend using the "Enter Checks" task for this correction using the actual period end dates and check sequence 2 or 3 for the Net Zero Pay check to make the adjustments. Using "Enter Checks" allows you to confirm that the Net Pay is zero after you've done the in and out entries for both pays and tax withholdings to the correct states.

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