It still amazes me sometimes when I see questions from my fellow payroll professionals about how accurate we have to be when it comes to tax deposits and reports. As we all know the curse of being a payroll professional is that everything you do has to be 100% correct. No 99% accuracy on tax deposits, no 99.9% pure on tax reporting. Most of us have had to face the question, do I really have to redo this for such a small error? So I always get a giggle when I see the question come around on the boards about correcting something that isn’t quite 100% accurate. I know its from someone new to our profession just asking and hoping for a certain answer but knowing in their hearts they won’t hear it. For example, a couple of weeks ago on the one of the listservs I follow someone asked the following: We left off the employee contribution to the HSA on the Forms W-2. Since they have already gone out to the employees do we just leave them alone?
You know the results of the responses without my listing it but let me summed it up with this short excerpt: … You can’t just say “oh, well” and dismiss the problem after statements are mailed to employees…In other words no matter what, payroll must be 100% accurate, 100% of the time. Welcome to the world of the payroll professional! But then again, we wouldn’t want it any other way.