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.
Charles Hylan, CPA, MBA, is the managing director at The Growth Partnership, where he advises clients within several areas of TGP’s service offerings, including marketing, strategic planning, partner relationships and leadership development. Additionally, he is a senior business developer at ABLE: CRM for CPAs and leads efforts to bring the Rosenburg survey, a benchmark report comparing over 100 metrics across nearly 400 firms to the accounting marketplace. He has experience consulting and working with accounting firms ranging from sole practitioners to national and Big Five firms.
Louisa Harbage-Edell is the director of market intelligence and strategy for Arity. She has spent her entire career in the insurance industry and most of that surrounded by telematics, first as an actuarial analyst at Progressive Insurance, before transitioning to business consulting, where she spent over a decade helping to build initial demand for telematics programs across the insurance industry, including launching the precursor product to DriveAbility.
Megan Klein is the Actuarial and Rating Services Director at Arity. Her team is responsible for the actuarial support of Arity’s telematics models, enabling insurance companies to execute on their goals around telematics. Leveraging over a decade of P&C insurance product and pricing experience, Megan ensures telematics risk models are actuarially sound, consumable by users, and supportable with regulators. Megan received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics: Statistics and Actuarial Science from the University of Northern Iowa. She is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society.
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.
