Medicare wages (box 5) not showing in W2 printouts

General support regarding TimeTrex, such as
configuring policies/taxes or processing payroll.
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davidd101011
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2019 12:17 pm

Medicare wages (box 5) not showing in W2 printouts

Post by davidd101011 »

When doing my W2 filings for this year, the efile blocked me because

Code: Select all

Error Message: 
Medicare Wages and Tips must be greater than or equal to the sum of Social Security Wages and Social Security Tips when Tax Year is after 1990.
Sure enough, every W2 has a blank value for medicare wages.
Screenshot from 2022-01-30 19-18-57.png
This box should be at least as much as box 1. It shows up correctly in the summary report:
Screenshot from 2022-01-30 19-21-12.png
PLEASE let me know how to fix this. I've been clicking around the report setup for quite some time now.
davidd101011
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2019 12:17 pm

Re: Medicare wages (box 5) not showing in W2 printouts

Post by davidd101011 »

There appears to be no solution for this and I am highly disappointed. I didn't include the "medicare" tax in payroll processing (because the amounts are so low that it's basically a rounding error), so this box appears blank. Even if I add the tax now, it won't show.
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: Medicare wages (box 5) not showing in W2 printouts

Post by shaunw »

There definitely is a solution, but it depends on the exact details of your situation. Just to clarify, you went out of your way to change the default values in TimeTrex to configure it so that your employees do not have medicare deducted from their pay stub? Therefore it was never deducted nor sent to the government for all of 2021, correct? How many quarters were you using TimeTrex with this incorrect setup in 2021?
davidd101011
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2019 12:17 pm

Re: Medicare wages (box 5) not showing in W2 printouts

Post by davidd101011 »

I didn't change any defaults, but apparently what you say is correct. Medicare was not listed under the "tax" section for any employees. We're only talking about 1.5 months of work since we are a seasonal employer, so there is only one quarter of data.

To be clear, these lines weren't present in any of the 16 employees (again, I changed no defaults).
Screenshot from 2022-01-31 07-34-52.png
I have already manually edited the output files so I was able to submit these totals on time, but I would like to know a permanent solution.
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: Medicare wages (box 5) not showing in W2 printouts

Post by shaunw »

Upon installation, TimeTrex assigns all federal (and some state) taxes to Employee -> New Hire Defaults, so they are assigned to each new employee you add automatically. So either these defaults were modified, or you manually unassigned Medicare from each employee.

Anyways, unfortunately in this case, correcting pay stubs retroactively can be a fairly involved process, simply due to the fact that these taxes affect both the employee and employer contributions, which results in changes (reduction) to the employees net pay, and of course you can't retroactively reduce what you paid an employee, so you have to top-up their earnings in other ways.

If this isn't corrected exactly right, it can snowball into a pretty big mess of corrections on top of corrections, on top of corrections, so we would recommend that you consider purchasing a Professional Services package to have TimeTrex help you get everything sorted out correctly, the first time.
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