Tax FAQ

Check does not provide or file Form 8846. This form is used for food and beverage establishments to claim a credit for employer social security and medicare taxes paid on certain employee tips. The form is typically handled by a CPA, but employers may request a report from you that helps them fill it out.

Check doesn’t currently have all the data needed to calculate all the figures on this form, which is why we don’t support it and this would typically be completed by a CPA if the employer wasn’t able to complete all the data themselves.

Example: The form is asking for the hourly wage rate (not including tips) for each employee. This is something that’s always passed to us, so it wouldn’t be in our reports. You or the employer could back into this amount based off wages/hours worked.

There’s also a fair amount of calculation needed to complete this form using wages and tips from our reporting. We’ve written some blog posts (example) that your team can reference to better understand how Check supports tip credits, which may help you as you aim to help employers here.

An employee’s primary workplace is used for special tax scenarios where we have to tax at a primary workplace, rather than each individual workplace. If there’s a location where these employees worked most often, I’d set that as the primary workplace. If not, any workplace that they work at would suffice.

There are a couple of reasons why we may require a primary workplace:

For a Voluntary churn = 5 business days SLA, and for Involuntary churn = 90 days (if they want a refund sooner, they can voluntarily terminate services).

Check collects NAICS codes for companies in states where it’s required, like Wyoming & Maryland. It's required on some tax forms.

We don’t support tax overrides at the payroll item level at the moment, and it’s not on our near-term roadmap. However, there is a workaround where by claiming a high dependent credit, you will block the tax and then can put the amount to withhold in the additional withholding which would mimic an override. You’d want to make sure the W4 is returned to normal afterwards.

We support ITINs for contractors, but not for employees. We accept any value for the ssn field on either object, but the validation that populates the ssn_validation_status is different for each object.

SSNs are reported to the state for new hire reporting. If a new SSN is assigned, they would show up in the filings moving forward. For new SSNs, clients would need to submit a support ticket that would either be an amendment request or if they received a filing failure notifying them of a partial failure, it would be a refile request—both are chargeable.

We will print and mail W-2s & 1099s to workers who were paid in the year as long as we have the historical payroll information. If the employees are now inactive, regardless of whether they’ve opted into electronic delivery of the form, we will still print and mail. We also don't block paystub/report/form generation for terminated employees. Our recommendation would be to surface company documents, reports, etc in case the company needs that information post-termination.

The W-2 preview report is up-to-date throughout the year, since we generate W-2 data every day. W-2 previews pulled for previous years will contain the data that was included on the W-2 filing for that year. Therefore, the partner can surface the W-2 report in their product and rely on the contents of that report being up to date.

The 2% shareholder insurance is treated as imputed income - it gets added to the employee, taxed, and comes right back out. In most cases, the 2% shareholder elects to NOT withhold federal and state taxes from this income ( and it's exempt from SS and Medicare) so the net pay remains unchanged in this instance. The spreadsheets that you are providing will give us the necessary information to ensure that all wages are being adjusted accordingly.

We categorize these as local (or city) taxes.

The majority of our partners use Check generated paystubs to ensure compliance, and in our paystubs we surface all taxes as separate line items in one tax section, grouped by the payer (Company or Employee) of the tax. We are tracking future additions to be able to surface more granular tax data, but we don't have a timeline for when this would be available. One potential approach here is that you store the tax info in your database for future reporting, but for paystub generation to use the JSON version of the Employee Paystub API, instead of using the Check generated PDFs, which would return both the employer/employee taxes.

Yes we do, social security is one of the standard payroll taxes that are taken. In Check, this will be marked as FICA. We calculate this automatically.

There is no set date in which we perform all filings. Generally, we try to file as early as possible and prioritize filings where filing early is ideal.

You can preview filing data by looking at the Company Tax Package that is published around the 1st week after quarter end. All the tax returns we’d be filing for the period are contained in those documents. If a discrepancy is identified, a ticket should be submitted immediately. If filing hasn't occurred, we can update, but in most cases this will lead to an amendment.

Successful filings will result in a corresponding Tax document appearing in Company documents (ex: 941). Failed filings are available in our TaxFilings API (which currently shows Failed Filings ONLY).

The timing of our W-2 distribution varies each year but typically occurs in mid-January. We will provide dates for both posting and print and mail closer towards the end of year.

Our W-2 forms are generated by our operators for each company, specifically for the forms required for filing. We then transmit these forms to the relevant agencies as part of the filing process.

Since we handle the tax filings on your behalf, your team won't have to check if these taxes were potentially filed on time. However, a failed filing is possible in cases such as an incorrect tax ID was provided to Check. In such cases, we will receive notifications from the agencies and promptly follow up with you to rectify any issues.

All quarterly returns are posted within the first two weeks after the close of the previous quarter.

Your annual returns are posted within the first two weeks after the close of the year.

Payroll supports withholding for NY state disability insurance (SDI) and the family leave insurance (FLI) tax, from your employees. These amounts that are withheld will not leave your bank account. New York requires all employers to obtain SDI through a private insurance provider and remit the payment through that provider.

If you receive a tax notice, you can send it directly to your payroll provider so that they can research the issue. The provider will work with the tax agency to assess the discrepancy and determine if the liability is accurate.

California taxes bonuses and commissions at two different flat rates, 10.23% and 6.6% respectively. If an employee’s payroll item in a single payroll includes just bonuses or just commissions, we are able to calculate those earnings at the appropriate rate. However, if an employee’s payroll items on a single payroll include both bonuses and commissions, we will tax the entire amount of bonuses and commissions at the bonus rate.

For off-cycle payrolls, if the off-cycle withholding rate is supplemental, we will tax all earnings, regardless of the earning’s type, at the bonus rate for California withholding tax.