IN Counties Announce Tax Rate Changes

DeKalb, Hancock and Monroe counties have changed their county income tax rates. These changes take effect on Oct. 1, 2014.

The changes for DeKalb, Hancock and Monroe counties are as follows:

• DeKalb – The resident rate has increased from .015 to .02. The nonresident rate has decreased from .0075 to .005.
• Hancock – The resident rate has increased from .0165 to .017. The nonresident rate has increased from .0045 to .005.
• Monroe – The resident rate has increased from .0105 to .01095. The nonresident rate has increased from .002625 to .0027375.

Local income tax rates are established or adjusted by county officials and reported to the Indiana Department of Revenue, where they are cross-referenced to ensure they are supported by Indiana law.

The list of rates for all Indiana counties is available on the Indiana Department of Revenue’s website at http://in.gov/dor/reference/files/dn01.pdf. These rates affect businesses with employees who live or work in any of these counties and have income tax withholdings.

Employers with questions about these county income tax rates can contact the department at (317) 233-4016.

Oklahoma SUI Wage Base to Decrease for 2015

I have a very reliable source that is telling me that the Oklahoma’s unemployment insurance taxable wage base for 2015 will decrease to $17,000.  Their source is an Oklahoma Employment Security Commission Representative.  This is down from $18,700 for this year.   The new employer rate will also drop to 2.2%.

Tweeting about Payroll

The great thing about doing payroll in this day and age is all the information you can find on the Internet. I can remember in my first years in payroll back in the late 70s, having to do all the research myself and not having anybody to ask  “hey what’s going on?”. But now we can find information at our fingertips and converse with hundreds of people on a topic of interest. An example of this is the social media event being held by the American Payroll Association (APA). On Thursday, September 25 at 3 PM EDT experts from the APA along with a special guest from Ceridian will participate in an hour-long Twitter chat on the Affordable Care Act and its impact on payroll. Join the chat on Twubs at http://goo.gl/9HXMvj or chime in on twitter or #paynews. I will be joining in the discussion and I hope you can to.

Let’s Start Getting Ready for Year End–Beginning with Third-Party Sick Pay

It’s hard to believe it is already fall.   There is a fall feel in the air in some places–still hot where I am.  But it is definitely cooling down which means Halloween will soon be upon us, followed by Thanksgiving etc.  But to us payroll professionals fall also means time to start thinking and planning for year end.  Time to start getting all our ducks in a row for processing the Forms W-2 for 2014.  So as items come across my desk that deal with year end I will post them here for you.  This time I want to discuss the Form W-2 reporting changes for third-party sick pay.  Effective January 2015, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will no longer process the “Third-Party Sick Pay Recap” or what we used to call the “dummy W-2”.  This recap is required in order to reconcile Forms W-2 with the Forms 941 for the calendar year when insurance companies or plan administrators share employment tax responsibilities with the employer for disability payments. Under the new procedures, applicable insurance companies, administrators and employers will be required to file Form 8922, Third-Party Sick Pay Recap with the IRS by February 28th or March 31st if filing electronically.  The Form 8922 is actually still in draft form on the IRS website but they hope to have the form finalized by December.

 

Montana 2015 SUI Taxable Wage Base Going Up

The Montana Department of Labor & Industry SUI Division has reported in their 3rd quarter “Quarterly News” that the SUI taxable wage base for 2015 will be $29,500.  This is an increase of $500 from this year’s base of $29,000.

We Have Improved Our Blog

In our quest to make getting payroll news updates to you easier and faster we have decided to change the direction of our blog posts.  From today, our news updates will be our blog posts on Tuesday through Friday.  All updates will be entered as a blog post.  Don’t worry we will still send out the news updates via email and post to twitter and linked in.  Our email news updates will contain the main info of the news item and the needed links.  But our twitter and linked in posts will just state the basics of what is being updated and refer to the blog for more info.  For example, we sent out an update for the new California sick leave mandate. We sent out an email update, a twitter update, and a LinkedIn update. Going forward we will still send out an email update with the basic information but the twitter and LinkedIn updates will simply state California mandates sick leave with a link to our blog. We will also be replacing the news page on our website with the blog page. This will allow us to update our website at the same time that we do the blog. This prevents delays in getting our website updated. But more important this allows us to leave updates on our website longer than 2 to 3 weeks. Many of our subscribers have commented on the fact that we only allow a short period of time for each news article to be posted to our website. This will no longer be a problem. All blog updates will be maintained on our website indefinitely. To accomplish all this we had to move our blog from blogspot to WordPress. We appreciate your patience while this change is being made. And we hope you like the new blogs.