Payroll

Are Skyped meetings compensable?

03/19/2015

Q: Department managers conduct monthly meetings in person and via Skype for employees who are off, so they don’t have to come in and attend the meetings. Must we pay a minimum amount of hours?

Chart: Health care information reporting

03/18/2015

Make sure your health care information reporting duties are covered with this handy chart.

You can take it with you, but read this first, please

03/16/2015

Departing employees may take the pretax contributions they made into their 401(k) or 403(b) accounts with them when they leave, but you must first provide them with a notice of their rollover options. The IRS has updated the model safe-harbor notices you can use for this purpose.

The price for misclassifying workers? $83,051,159

03/12/2015

The Department of Labor is working diligently to determine whether you properly classify your workers as employees or independent contractors. And that’s not all the DOL is doing.

Do we have to pay overtime for hours an employee spent out on sick leave?

03/11/2015

Q. Last week, an employee was out sick on Monday but worked 40 hours Tuesday through Friday. She would like to use her sick leave for Monday and claim overtime for those Monday hours. Must I pay her overtime for those hours?

Never threaten deductions from exempts’ pay

03/11/2015

A supervisor’s single threat leading to a salary deduction could cost your company millions.

What’s the law on how often to pay?

03/10/2015

Q. As a new small business owner, I am unsure of the laws governing wage payment. Are there rules concerning how often I must pay my employees?

Watch out for, prepare to fix, these 6 common overtime pay errors

03/09/2015

Failing to properly pay for all overtime hours worked could result in more financial harm than good. Here are six payroll pitfalls you must avoid.

FICA refunds due on ‘excess’ mass transit fringes

03/09/2015

Congress’ last-minute and retroactive reinstatement of parity between mass transit benefits and employer-provided parking—to $250 a month for both, for 2014 only—is no favor to Payroll. If you allowed employees to defer more than $130 for mass transit benefits last year on an after-tax basis, or paid out of the company’s coffers, they and you are due FICA refunds on the difference—up to $120 a month.

IRS won’t bow to Tax Court in payroll tax case

03/06/2015

Closely-held corporations and their owners can seem inseparable. But this fluidity stops at Payroll’s door—in other words, when income tax withholding begins. The IRS recently issued a document called an Action on Decision in which it said that it won’t follow a Tax Court decision that required it to honor a company’s designation of its delinquent payroll taxes as payment for a specific employee’s delinquent income taxes.