The Internal Revenue Service released information on how employees now have until the end of the year to repay any payroll taxes they deferred from last year.
Former President Trump issued a presidential memorandum last August allowing Social Security taxes to be deferred for the rest of 2020, but under the order they had to be repaid by April 30, 2021. The coronavirus relief package that Congress passed last month extended the repayment period until the end of this year.
Relatively few companies actually implemented the payroll deferral for their employees because there was no guarantee that the deferred payroll taxes would ultimately be forgiven by Congress. However, federal employees and military service members were still required to accept the payroll tax deferral, meaning those taxpayers will be facing smaller paychecks later this year.
Alan S. Kaplinsky is senior counsel and the former practice leader for 25 years of the Consumer Financial Services Group at Ballard Spahr LLP. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and is a past chair of the Committee on Consumer Financial Services of the Section of Business Law of the American Bar Association. He regularly hosts a weekly podcast show, Consumer Finance Monitor.
José Quiñonez, a 2016 MacArthur Genius Fellow, is CEO of Mission Asset Fund. He is a former legislative assistant to Rep. Ruben Hinojosa and nonprofit lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
Dara Duguay is the CEO of Credit Builders Alliance. Before joining CBA, she was the director of Citigroup’s Office of Financial Education and founding executive director of the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.
In Notice 2021-11, the IRS on Tuesday explained how employers who deferred payroll taxes on behalf of their employees can withhold and pay the deferred taxes throughout 2021 instead of just within the first four months of the year.
The deferral applied to employees who were paid less than $4,000 every two weeks, or an equivalent amount for other pay periods, with each pay period considered separately. The taxes, which are technically called Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance, or OASDI, are calculated at 6.2 percent of employees’ wages.
Notice 2021-11 makes changes to last year’s Notice 2020-65 to reflect the extended payment period. Payments made by Jan. 3, 2022, will be considered to be timely because Dec. 31, 2021, is a legal holiday. However, any penalties, interest and additions to tax will now start to apply on Jan. 1, 2022, for any unpaid balances
The IRS cautioned that employees could see their deferred taxes being collected immediately, so employees should check with their organization’s payroll point of contact on what their collection schedule will be.
