This article addresses the concept of ensuring your payroll tax filings and payments are up to date and correct.

One sure sign that your payroll tax obligations might be amiss is if a recent payroll tax payment never cleared your bank account. This could be due to the fact that you depended on your payroll software to submit the payment automatically or perhaps the filing was not completed and thus the corresponding payment, although posted in your bookkeeping software, was not actually submitted either.

Periodically, you should be reviewing your payroll tax filings and payments to verify the following:

• Ensure submission of everything; always obtain some sort of confirmation and perhaps an audit trail if available.
• Ensure the correct amounts were also submitted as well, in both the filing and the payment.
• Ensure your current payroll liability balance in your bookkeeping software seems correct. Example: If you are always running a negative or a very high bloated balance in one of more of your payroll tax obligations accounts, then this probably is a red flag to review and resolve.
• Login periodically to the actual tax agency website and review and verify your current status is correct:
  • The payroll tax rates
  • The history of your filings and payments (hopefully they match your records in your bookkeeping software).
  • The current liability balance as stated by the tax agency (again, hopefully this matches your current in-house payroll records).

Lastly, always ensure that all of your payroll tax payments are submitted on time! The IRS even counts weekends as lead time to submit your semi-weekly payroll tax payments.

Note: AccuraBooks is a bookkeeping firm only, so please consult with your C.P.A. for verification and clarification about the contents of this article.