Sure, IRS wants employers to become more reliant on filing W-2s electronically. But it insists that firms do this by hand … or else.
According to a recent IRS announcement, employers must manually key in any Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) for employees who them — effective Tax Year 2011.
Workers who need a taxpayer ID number but don’t have and aren’t eligible to have a Social Security number (e.g., non-residents) are granted ITINs.
So if your Payroll has relied on W-2 software for automatic year-end processing, let them know about the new IRS requirements — and make sure any applicable auto-populate functions are disabled.
ITINs are nine-digit numbers that always begin with a 9 and have a range of 10-88, 90-92 or 94-99 in the fourth and fifth digits.
So what happens to firms that choose to ignore this IRS mandate? The Service says it may boot noncompliant business out of the e-file program.