Head of Household in NY broken

[williamconley]

New installation, everything else seems to work perfectly. First employee set up and perfectly matches the Intuit Online calculations for pay stubs.

Which is why I was completely surprised when I put the same deductions in and it was off by a couple bucks. Then I realized (by comparing deductions) that it was the State Income tax that was off.

I reviewed, and realized that I had left the employee as Single. So I changed to Head of Household ... and the State Income Tax disappeared completely! (No longer off by a couple bucks, but the entire amount of the state income tax! $51.24! Ouch.

So I changed it back to "Single". It was again only off by a couple bucks. Then I changed from 4 to 5 deductions ... and now it's only off by a few cents. Still wrong, of course.

So I changed it to Head of Household and tried deductions as 1,2,3,4 ... all to no avail. Just to be funny, I also tried "Married - Spouse Does Not Work" (This also did not work ...) and "Married - Spouse Works" (This worked, but of course was wrong just like single.).

Summary: NY Head of Household and NY Married - Spouse does not work are both broken. "Single" works, and one of the two "Married" works.

Fresh install: TimeTrex_Standard_Edition_v5.0.7 downloaded from SourceForge.net 6/10/2012. Running in VMWare-installed openSUSE 11.3 (x86_64) installed via Vicibox.com .iso version 3.1.15.

Goal here is to duplicate pay stubs from the first of the year and then move "off" Intuit online (Perhaps?). I was pleasantly surprised to find this software available (I searched a few months ago and did not find it ... not sure where you were hiding, LOL, before I started up Intuit Online!).

[shaunw]

Can you provide the gross earnings amount on the pay stub, or a sample pay stub? Also the exact values that Intuit Online calculated for comparison. Be sure to include the exact number of allowances/deductions and marriage status for your example too.

Also have you compared with the NY withholding tables to see if Intuit's calculations are correct?

There are a lot of things that can change the calculation, so we need all that information so we can replicate the issue here.

[williamconley]

Gross $1100.00

Federal Income Tax: $62.74
Social Security $46.20
Medicare $15.95
NY Income Tax: $51.24

But the important thing: It's not that Timetrex is "miscalculating". It's simply removing the NY Income Tax line and not deducting it at all! But only if Head of Household or Married - Spouse does not work.

I hardly think that there's an "algorithm" that causes NY Income tax to "disappear" when changing from Single to Head of Household (or from Married - Spouse works to Married - Spouse does not work). I would expect that that standard "single/married" values were always there and the "newly added" two (spouse does not work and head of household) were added ... but somehow not correctly. And when the class fails ... the entire line disappears (instead of tossing an error!) which leaves the paycheck very wrong.

Otherwise, brilliant software. And this can obviously be "worked around", but I thought it may be better to fix it! LOL (Unless this is "special" to my installation due to a memory issue or odd package conflict).

[shaunw]

I will see if I can replicate the issue on our end, but the likely reason the tax is "disappearing" is because for whatever reason TimeTrex thinks the tax amount is below the minimum threshold and therefore no state tax should be deducted. Try increasing the gross pay to $5000+ to see if TimeTrex starts calculating the tax amount again?

Also, what is your pay period schedule, bi-weekly, semi-monthly?

[williamconley]

Excellent suggestion. However: No joy. I changed the gross weekly pay to $11,000 (up from $1,100) and the "Marred - Spouse Works" NY State Income Tax withholding jumped over $800. But then when I changed to "Head of Household", the NY State Income Tax withholding once again disappeared from the pay stub.

Oh: Weekly Pay. Mon-Sun. 5 Day dispersal (IE: Friday payday) with pay day being before a holiday that falls on Friday.

Hire Date 1/1/2012. This is on the Pay period 1/2/2012 - 1/8/2012 with payment Date 1/13/2012.

The ONLY change being made is from Married - Spouse Works to Head of Household under Admin->Employee Administration->[this employee]->Functions->Payroll->Tax->State Income Tax->Edit->Filing Status

In case it makes a difference: Auburn, NY 13021! (For both Company AND Employee)

[shaunw]

I think the real issue is that TimeTrex should only be giving you two options, Single or Married as those are the only two options as far as the NY tax formula is considered. I will pass this on to the developers to investigate as to why its giving more than those two options.

[williamconley]

I am not sure i agree with that. While I have not looked at the state requirements yet personally, I suspect that the existence of the other two statuses coinciding with the Intuit statuses indicates that they should in fact be there.

[shaunw]

The NY tax formula only accounts for Single and Married, and the withholding allowance certificate has three options:

Single or Head of Household
Married
Married, but withhold at higher single rate

Which is really boils down to two options, Single and Married. Since this setting is strictly relating to the tax formula itself, having more options than Single and Married would only seem to confuse people.

[williamconley]

So the broken married - spouse does not work does not belong there at all, and the head of household should just be combined with single OR still compute as single.

Oddly enough, however, the Single and Married both computed differently than Intuit did for that Head of Household employee (the second employee, the first one who used Single was perfectly matched!). After I changed the deductions to 5 instead of 4, and single to married (instead of head of household which should match single, right? LOL), the number was off by 4 cents. Which is close enough for my purposes. I'll still check to see if I can make an "adjustment" that will simply alter that number by 4 cents which would make it perfect (without adding anything visual to the printed form ...). That way the newly generated pay stubs will match the prior ones precisely ... and we can move forward dropping Intuit whenever we like.

And just to be VERY clear: You've been very helpful. Good to find a project like this. You'll be recommended to all my clients as an excellent open source package (with scalability for those who want to go Enterprise in the future).

Hard to compete with Intuit, though. LOL ($40/month and they handle the electronic payments and remind which taxes are due when. Handy. And the first three months were only $10 each! But the owner wants more control ... whatchagonnado?)