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.
Iris Zarecki is vice president of marketing at Continuity Software.
Varun Ebenezer is a senior IT audit manager at BMO Financial Group, USA, and a member of the ISACA.
Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss is the CEO and founder of omni:us, an AI provider helping the insurance industry embrace digitisation. Sofie, who was recently listed as one of Forbes ‘Top 50 Women in Tech’, originally founded omni:us after several successful business ventures, the first of which was set up when she was 21. Twelve years later in 2015, along with her team of co-founders, Sofie launched omni:us as a way to enable insurance companies to fully automate and streamline the claims process, utilising emerging AI and machine learning technology to understand, extract and validate data from a large variety of documents.
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.
