If you’re an employee in the state, you should have received your Oklahoma W-2 form before February 1. The deadline for employers to provide each employee with a W-2 was January 3. If you didn’t receive a W-2 form or it was inaccurate, now is the time to request a new one from your employer.
Everyone working in Oklahoma, should receive an accurate W-2 form reporting his or her earnings for the previous year. This includes full-time and part-time employees.
The most common cause of missing W-2 forms is the employee. The most common reason is a new home address. Many times an employee will move and fail to provide a new W-4 indicating the new address. At other times, the employee may have supplied an incomplete address. Or, the payroll clerk may have updated the personnel file, but not the payroll records. After all, mistakes do happen.
In recent years, the IRS has become much stricter about enforcing the law on W-2 forms. 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 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.
