January 31 was the deadline established by the IRS for every employer in the state of California to distribute accurate 2006 California W-2 forms to their employees. In spite of the fact that this deadline is a law, there are still problems every year.
Everyone working in California must receive an accurate W-2 form reporting his or her earnings for the previous year. This applies to part-time as well as full-time workers. This law presents no problems for most employers but there are some who seem to have perennial problems.
In its efforts to identify these employers, the IRS now requires all employees to include additional paperwork with their income tax returns whenever a W-2 is not received. The additional paperwork is Form 4598 and Form 4852, which the IRS uses to track the employers who fail to provide this document and to ascertain why the W-2 wasn’t made available to the employee. Before 2004, the IRS was a bit more lenient. At that time, an employee could simply submit a copy of their year-end paycheck stub instead of the W-2 or the additional IRS forms required now.
There are any numbers of ways the employer can generate this information for the employee. Many large firms employ their own payroll department to accurately maintain and distribute such information. Others hire one of the payroll-processing firms becoming increasingly popular. These payroll-processing firms automatically generate income tax information as a part of their services provided.
Unfortunately, it’s most often the small business owner who is late distributing this important information and others just never get around to it. Indeed, they probably didn’t go into business to do paperwork anyway. In an effort to ease the burden of distribution of the employer, the IRS now allows W-2s that have been electronically transferred to the employee in PDF format but only if the employee gives permission for this type of distribution beforehand.
