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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.
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.
...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.
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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.
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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Actually, I don't think that is it. My bet would be that most payroll systems are coded to assume that everyone who pays the payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare) pay the same percentage up to the limit (you only pay these taxes up to a certain amount because you only collect based on income up to a certain amount). They are now introducing a system whereby those who earn less than a certain amount pay less than those who earn more than that (and the cutoff point is different from the amount which you don't pay this tax on the income above that amount--although you still pay for everything less than that amount that you earn).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
"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.
...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
Yes, any decent payroll software has tax table updates, but they don't all support multi-tier rates like this. I consult on an accounting suite with a payroll module, and they had to release a full-on code patch this year to support a change in Connecticut that took effect in August, whereas they usually just release simple updates that save you the trouble of hand-entering all the new rates.
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.