Massachusetts Employers: Reporting Update

Massachusetts is making another change to their online reporting systems, effective with 4th Quarter 2009.

Effective January 2009 Massachusetts requires ALL employers, including nanny employers, to file and pay their withholding tax and unemployment tax online. Only one problem - the online systems did not support employers who DO NOT withhold income tax and only report unemployment taxes. Oops. Household employers are the ONLY employers not required to deduct state income taxes from the employees paycheck. This makes sense, many household employees are day workers (weekly cleaning lady for example) and the extra burden of deducting and remitting a dollar or so a week was deemed overly burdensome to the employer.

The state is completely re-engineering the process and will introduce a unified wage reporting, unemployment tax remittance and withholding tax remittance system, dubbed QUEST, on December 7, 2009.

According to Massachusetts' online notice:

When implemented, the DUA QUEST Revenue System will automate the Registration, Wage and Employment Reporting, Tax Calculation and Payment processes, and facilitate these time-saving improvements for employers:

> Employers will be able to get complete up-to-date account information
> Wage and Employment filings, UI and UHI Tax filings can be completed in a single process
> Large Employers and/or Third Party Agents will be able to file electronically and process multiple records at the same time
> Smaller Employers will be able to use online processing for quarterly tax filing and upload documents using specified formats

HomeWork Solutions will make every effort to facilitate this process for its NaniTax clients - those clients who receive tax preparation services only and pay their nanny directly and pay their taxes directly. If you would like to consider outsourcing the tax payment process, we encourage you to consider our NaniTax Plus Services. This service level does require some additional signed authorizations and the conversion from NaniTax to NaniTax Plus typically takes 2 weeks. Premium service clients - no worries. We will handle the details.

Online filing and tax remittance is becoming the norm. HomeWork Solutions makes ALL IRS payments for clients via automated online services. We take your privacy and information security very seriously. All online processes operate behind a Secure Socket Layer and our servers are audited and certified routinely by Security Metrics, a leading provider of Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) security solutions.