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Ready For Your Payroll Software Update?
SEWilco writes "A federal payroll tax reduction for two months is being pushed by the President. Paying less money to the government seems good, but if the law is changed it will change the payroll taxes in January and February. Many of us can well imagine what that will do to the many payroll systems which are already programmed with the 2012 tax rates."
Attention! We need you, all you COBOL programmers!.
The possible extension -- or not -- of the reduced payroll tax has been discussed in the news for some time. I'd hope that at least some of the people who maintain these systems have been paying attention. It's just a change in the withholding tables, after all.
They'll load a different tax rate table. I'm sure it's modular enough they can just change a table (or two, or three) and be done.
Seems easy to me. But then I write software for a living, so what would I know.
Like a good time to revise my daily rate then.
A software update! What will we do? This is like y2k all over again!
Really?!?! *This* is a story? Slow news day?
"A federal payroll tax reduction" Is this a reduction of federal tax for all jobs, or a reduction of taxes for federal jobs?
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
If your payroll software is that crappy that you have to update it for this change then please buy some real stuff. All you do is change the tax tables.
Honestly, what crap software out there requires a full software update to change tax tables?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's fine to do some anti-cyclic economy... and I understand the merits.
But wasn't it the idea that you reduce expenses in boon times, and go anti-cyclic, and thereby spend more in bad times?
But the last decade, the USA has clearly acted cyclic, not anti-cyclic. The US has spent money like its life depended on it (and many thought it really did, with terrorists lurking in every corner of the world, all aiming to bomb the US back into the Middle Ages).
It's surprising to see that there is even more money available... and it makes me wonder who will go down first in economic terms: the EU, or the USA.
As others have said, updating the rates in the tax tables is trivial. It actually takes us more time to go through change management process and get no less than 4 levels of approval to make the changes in the production payroll system.
I wonder how many payroll systems out there were hard coded to the assumption that taxes only change on a year-to-year basis, not a month-to-month basis, so you can only load a tax table for a whole year, not a tax table for the next two months?
It may be that a software update will be necessary to change the code to add the ability to load a tax table for just one month, or a range of months, or an arbitrary range (e.g. 21st Jan to 15th April). I think if I were writing tax software, after what has happened the last couple months, I'd go for the last approach, since it seems like a law changing the taxes could go into effect at any time and last for any arbitrary duration of days.
...fuck you /., my Karma is terrible for some stupid reason, so i start at -1? It's not like I'm trolling or flame-baiting, every one of my posts is on topic. So fuck you, that's what i have to say about that. I'll just start a new account. With blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget the new account!
Nope... not trolling or flame-baiting at all there.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
A bunch of idiots introduces the need for a change in the last minute? That's something I'm sure no developer would've expected.
I use surepayroll, rebranded through my bank. I don't even think of this crap anymore, I just pay us and then do something I enjoy more.
Do you have ESP?
Actually they start at 0. And the "stupid reason" is simply because you don't seem to write informative, interesting or insightful posts, and funny doesn't give you karma.
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Payroll Taxes include Federal, State and Local. The includes many other Payroll deductions too. These change frequently. Quickbook Payroll pushes data and code updates for every payroll period. You can';t run a QB Payroll without the latest Payroll update. And most small business do Payrolls weekly and they don't screw it up, because they risk fines and penalties if they do.
My accountant doesn't even manage his own office's payroll. They outsource to one of the many payroll processing companies. With criminal and civil liabilities you're so much better off paying the cost to outsource, it's really pretty cheap.
At ~7m lines of legal language, the federal tax code is as large as many operating systems in complexity. Writing code that can correctly handle its business rules is probably as complex as many of the systems that Wall Street puts into place for real-time trading and risk analysis.
As a conservative, I hate to say Clinton was right, but Bill Clinton knocked it out of the park when he said we need to just lower rates and then wipe out most of the exemptions and credits. His only fault was not advocating the complete abolition of those things so the tax code would be predictable.
Modern tax apps have to deal with things like this. But "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
I'm sure my company and many others will be doing a test run before issuing 10s of thousands of checks and direct deposits.
I'd bet more than a few companies restore from backup and lose tax rate updates. Probably not big companies, but plenty of small ones where accounting and IT don't have their own "department" and don't have processes that drive everyone crazy most of the time but make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen.
"We never think before we act, and when we act, we act with politics in mind. Not intelligence in mind."
Progress - a forward or onward movement (as to an objective or to a goal) :
Congress - opposite of progress.
You're killing me. Do you have your tax rates hard-coded in the software, or what?
Proverbs 21:19
No. I'm in Canada.
I am actually surprised this is newsworthy. This one is not a change at all.
We've been dealing with changes in taxation since we designed our first retail product in 1986. When we added employee time tracking and more tax reports, the number of tax rules multiplied by about 3. If congress doesn't pass an extension, then we post a small update notice and all our sites (in the US) will have it within a minute, or the next time they launch our software.
You want to talk newsworthy, convince all local governments to use the same tax rules, preferably the same tax rate. Then I wouldn't be spending my Decembers and Januaries rooting around bulletins, making tiny rate changes to our tables.
My family has learned to not bother inviting me home for the holidays.
...the problem is that many companies/institutions close the pay period and issue pay stubs well in advance of the pay date. For example, I'm paid on the 1st of the month, but my January 1 pay check is for a pay period that ends December 22 (this Thursday), and by the evening of December 23 I will have an electronic pay stub waiting for me that shows my Social Security deduction for January 1. If Congress extends the tax holiday on, say, December 27, that doesn't leave much time to update the system, re-issue all the pay stubs, and change all the direct deposit information with the banks. Not impossible, but not a real friendly after-Christmas gift to throw to all the HR departments all across the country. And it's no way to run the world's largest economy.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
The December 2010 tax changes meant several official IRS forms were not available until February or even March. A lot of this had to do with basis information now mandated on brokerage 1099s. So the old habit of filing in early February for anticipated refund becomes less possible. Even April filing is threatened by lack of forms and data. More people get the automatic October extension tax-preparers tell me.
I really wish that they would not extend the payroll tax cut. Not that I'm itching to pay more taxes or anything, but are we giving up all pretense that Social Security is an earned benefit?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
A simple update of tax tables is all that would be required to deal with this.
Unless a program's tax table data structure isn't sufficiently fine-grained to deal with multiple tax tables that apply to different parts of a single year.
If some payroll department cannot handle this, how did they handle the original tax break?
Might they have handled it by assuming that all such tax breaks will start and stop when the ball drops on New Year's Eve?
No, its not.
A continuation of the current federal payroll tax "holiday" for a full year is being pushed by the President. Congress has a broad bipartisan agreement with this goal, but hasn't been able to agree on how to pay for it (Republicans want program cuts, Democrats what tax increases on the wealthy), and the compromise adopted in the Senate has been for a two-month extension to provide time for negotiations on a long-term solution.
Its actually between "paying the same money to the government as currently" (if the measure passes) and "paying more money to the government" (if it fails), paying less money isn't on the table.
No, if the law is not changed, payroll tax rates will change in January. If the law is changed, payroll tax rates will remain the same in January as they are now.
It will require them to be updated to reflect the same rates that the same systems applied for all of 2011, which -- even if the rates are hardcoded such that it requires a new build and code deployment -- should be fairly trivial. Since tax rate changes are a fairly regular occurrence, presumably on even moderately well-designed payroll systems this won't involve a code change at all, just a configuration change, table update, or something similar.
Stop calling it a tax cut! What they are doing to us has absolutely nothing to do with your actual tax burden. The plan is to just take less out of your paycheck, hence the name: payroll tax reduction. Then, in April 2012, most people will suddenly discover not enough money was withheld to cover their tax bill and they have to come up with cash to pay it. There is a HUGE difference between tax load and payroll deductions.
This is a really, truly, stupid article. $300 off-the-shelf Quickbooks, which 90% of all US small businesses use, has been handling this kind of stuff for at least a decade, if not two.
In other news, I heard that a bug has been found in Windows! How is this going to be addressed? Is Microsoft going to have to send new CD's to everybody on the planet, and everybody will have to re-write all of their Word documents?!?
To the clueless: tax tables change constantly, and are updated via the Net every time "Pay Employees" is clicked.
I don't respond to AC's.
PROTIP: There is something called causality. Or "time". /. in these past years, it's indeed more likely that the moderators were the trolls. ... unless you employ dickish prejudice.
So his current post can, by the laws of physics, not have an effect on his pre-posting karma.
For this post, his angriness is caused by his bad karma. Not the other way around.
His karma may or may not be caused by his previous trolling. But looking at
In any case, that is irrelevant to judging his current post.
So this makes your comment a non-sequitur, and a typical example of somebody thinking he's smart, when he's actually very dumb. (Close to trolling.)
And yes, there are so few small-digit /. users, because they gave up. The fail, extremism, blindness to look around one's own socially conditioned whatever-colored glasses, and sometimes mind-boggling stupidity of whoever currently gets the moderation points, is just not worth it.
If at all, we post anonymously.
I, for one, changed my password by copying and pasting the output of /dev/random, changing my e-mail to something at mailinator.com, saving, and then logging out.
He could unleash his worm on Dec 31,2011 and then have it automatically die on March 1st, 2012.
Two month tax break, what a bunch of Lusers!