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."

Comments

Siren voice....

[spaceplanesfan]

Attention! We need you, all you COBOL programmers!.

Srsly?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Change Management PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What?

[lennier1]

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.

Re:Software update?

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Honestly, what crap software out there requires a full software update to change tax tables?

Quicken 0.1a Private Garage Alpha "Cain" Edition running on 386 SX with DOS 5 known best for its 9/9/9 Sim City tax tables, no floating point operations, and inability to distinguish between charitable and political contributions.

Re:For two months?

[Attila Dimedici]

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).

Re:For two months?

[emurphy42]

This. More specifically, Googling (2012 Social Security tax cut) leads to http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/20/payroll-processors-say-two-month-fix-undoable/

According to the proposed law, the two-month extension of a 4.2 percent taxable wage is applied only to the first $18,350 of income. Wages exceeding $18,350 paid during the first two months of 2012 would be subject to a 6.2 percent Social Security tax rate.

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.

Re:Multiple tax tables

[Slashdot Parent]

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.

I can't speak for all payroll software packages, but QuickBooks can definitely handle this. All rates are specified with arbitrary effective dates. I'd be shocked if any payroll system could not handle mid-year changes. Stuff changes mid-year all the time.