Paperwork

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/36iOh7E

MM is helping me do my taxes. The math isn’t hard, it’s that you have to read the directions, and put the numbers very carefully into the correct boxes. I have very easy taxes, and yet. 

I also had to send in the Request For Reconsideration letter to the dep’t of labor. They were like, “but you’ve earned $0 in the last five quarters?” and the reason for that is that my social security number is incorrect on my W-2s. I was waiting for them to send me a form I could fill out to straighten it up. The form arrived May 10th or 11th, and I opened it, and it says Must Respond By 4/26, which, like… well…

so I wrote a little cover letter, explaining about the SSN problem, and in the introductory paragraph I tried to find the nicest way I could to say that, well, it was a little unusual of them to expect me to return this form two weeks before I’d received it, so I begged their indulgence in please allowing me to send it now as this was genuinely the earliest possible time I could do so.

Probably it won’t work, and probably I’m shit out of luck, and probably I will not be eligible for any money for the last… is it eight weeks now? It’s eight weeks this week I’ve been out of work. Sigh. And I guess I should count myself lucky that it’ll be okay if it turns out I wasn’t getting paid; my car’s paid off, I haven’t spent a dime the whole time I’ve been in MM’s house, and Dude has our household expenses under his control so it doesn’t matter. I’ll be okay.

It’s just deeply depressing, to have worked in a place eleven years and they can’t get your SSN right and nobody cares about the truth and your life’s not really worth anything. Shrug. 

I enclosed, in the letter to the DOL, a photocopy of my W-2, annotated forlornly with an arrow to the incorrect SSN on the form: “This is not my SSN. My SSN is [correct number, which is identical save the penultimate number]” and under that, an arrow to my name, and address, saying “But this is me”, and under that, an aside saying “I have worked here 11 years,” because it’s true. It’d’ve been twelve, this month. 

I don’t know. There’s not really anything else I can do. I don’t expect I’ll hear back from them soon, if at all. Probably, they’ll throw the whole thing out, because I was supposed to write back by a date two weeks before I received the letter so fuck me. 

Comments

[heartofoshun]

I am so sorry you are having to go through all of this!

[unicornduke]

I wouldn't worry too much about the date on the form, apparently it's very common right now. My dad got an unemployment thingy from one of his part timers and it was dated two weeks before it had been post marked.

[paean]

kudos to you for getting the form from the DOL and taking the step to fix the issue. I know how hard it is to deal with this, especially when it feels like you’re up against a giant bureaucracy and you have no idea if it’s going to work.

If you want help dealing with the SSA as well, I’m offering to do it with you. I learned a lot about navigating that kind of stuff as a very small business employer, and I’m sure there’s a My Employer Is A Dick SSN Correction Form or process somewhere.

[dragonlady7]

Ah, that's very sweet of you. I've started by emailing my boss about it. He was like "oh uh how have you managed to file your taxes all this time?!" and I was like "by waiting a really long time for my tax return each time" but like. i mean. they figured it out, it must be fine. except, of course, it is not.

So we'll see, though I don't know how to follow up on that at all.

[paean]

1 week is a generous amount of time to give him on fixing this, given that their mistake is costing you unemployment. If you don’t hear back within 7 days, email him again asking for the update on getting it fixed, and ask him at that time if there is someone in payroll you should contact directly.

If he gives you a new name to contact, send them the request to fix the SSN, and specifically say that you need them to refile your correct information with the social security administration for all the years they had it incorrect. That’s the agency every other agency uses to verify employment and income (not the IRS)..Request a time estimate for when you can expect the corrected information to be filed with the SSA.

This is going to require being polite, persistent, and probably telling everyone a sob story so they feel good about prioritizing your paperwork. Mr. P did this when a disability write off of a student loan caused a paperwork snafu that tanked his credit report right before we were going to buy a home. Fixing it requiresd a back end server rebuild at a big loan processor, but being both sympathetic and persistent got it done in under a month. Getting your information corrected will just require your work to fill out a few forms. It’s doable, but it takes making it a priority and probably feeling pretty uncomfortable insisting that they do it.

If you want, I’ll give you my non fandom contact info, and we can take is step by step on email or text.

[dragonlady7]

Ah-- this is probably going to go differently, though.
Everyone at our company has been laid off, including the people who are in charge of such things. Now, the person I'm in contact with is a co-owner of the company, but he isn't working there at the moment. His brother is, but that isn't his department.
(There are currently two employees reporting, one of whom is the other brother-owner, who is doing warehouse pickups and shipping, and the other of whom is my supervisor who is doing online order entry and shipping and receiving. It's weird times. Nobody is really doing office work, and the brother who is still working has never done administrative tasks really.)

So I've got the furloughed brother's email and his phone but it's his personal phone and I don't know what he's doing during this quarantine, and I asked my supervisor about this and he was like ah you just gotta call Furloughed Brother, IDK man.

This isn't exactly a professional operation.

[paean]

Got it. I’m a very small employer (we file on our nannies). It’s all doable, just an issue of following a lot of directions (a lot like filing taxes).

If they were filling under the wrong number for you, they should have been getting notices of the name SSN mismatch since 2018. It’s weird if they didn’t get notified. As far as I can tell, they just need to follow the process outlined as if they had received a notice. https://www.ssa.gov/employer/examplenotice.html. Unfortunately I can’t tell you the next step without logging on, and can’t do that on mobile.

Do you have your actual SS card available? I can imagine they may need a copy of that and your W2s if there’s an issue with the online forms.

Next step for you is email the furloughed brother and ask for help.

[dragonlady7]

I finally heard back and the payroll company wants $50 per W-2 to fix it. (I presume since my employer is saying this, he's expecting me to provide the money.) The payroll company claims they got the incorrect one from the previous provider, and implies my SSN has been incorrect the entire time I've worked at the company, which means my social security payroll tax has never ever been applied to my actual social security number. I'm not clear on how that works but I dimly remember getting statements on that in the past; don't the social security benefits you eventually get as a retiree somehow reflect the amount you worked in your life? I guess I have to look that up.
It's very clear my employer considers this both my fault and my problem.

But I don't understand if just fixing my number on a couple of W-2s is actually going to fix the issue. I mean... are they then going to re-report that? It's too late to reattach it to my taxes, and the Dept of Tax and Finance has never actually cared in the past that the numbers didn't match.

I haven't heard from the Dep't of Labor. I have absolutely no idea whether I ever will. I don't know where to start.

[paean]

You are correct, to get SS and Medicare, this has to get fixed eventually. To get unemployment, you have to get it fixed fast. Yes, they will have to resubmit all your W2s to the SSA. That’s a small hassle, which is why they want money to do it.

I’d break this down based on either just pure math, or how much you you want the satisfaction of being legally right (and if you want to risk burning bridges with your employer if they get annoyed at you.) It’s two totally different ways to make decisions about the next step. Here’s 2 options for the next step. For math, I’m looking at this only in the short term.

paying $50 x ?a decade? is expensive, but may be the fastest way to get it fixed, and if that had been on offer at the beginning of your period of unemployment , you would have had a net gain of far more than the initial outlay of cash (assuming you could borrow it or had that much in savings). The equation is now how long you now expect to be unemployed, how quickly the payroll
service will submit paperwork, what NY is giving weekly, and for how many weeks they will pay your unemployment before you become ineligible. It takes a chunk out of your benefits, but is probably the least work, and very probably the fastest. And there is an option to pay it up front, then hire a lawyer (if you are willing to burn bridges) to get that plus legal costs back. It’s not a sure fire win, but most small businesses will pay you the less than $1000 sum you demand to avoid worse in legal fees (especially because any employment lawyer will point out federal law, backed by federal penalties, make getting this right their legal responsibility). Pure math, due almost entirely to the speed of this solution, says this is likely your better option, unless you are returning to work shortly.

The other method is more work, and very likely will cost you more in opportunity costs due to the likely delay in getting it fixed, but may be more emotionally satisfying in the end if you are feeling a portion of the outrage that I had reading that they expect you to pay to fix their mistakes. NB, all this is true, but probably not worth the effort.

It’s an employers responsibility to sign your W4, and their signature certifies that they have looked at your SS card and the form is correct. They (and by extension anyone they subcontract to) are on the hook for then reporting based on a number that is not on your W4. Its a not legally legitimate excuse to say that the prior processor gave them the incorrect info. They have to keep your W4 on file, produce it for inspection by the SSA if requested, and it will be on them to produce proof that it was your error. Also, if I remember correctly, you said the problem started when the current payroll processor started doing your payroll, meaning that they probably just fucked up the data entry for the new account. That is a key point that you have to verify before we move forward in either case, because if it pre-exists this payroll processor, we have a bigger problem in getting your retirement SS entirely fixed.

Here’s the catch. I doubt you have a clearly documented paper trail of when the SSN was initially reported wrong that you requested that it get fixed. There’s a gray area that they will push hard that says you didn’t alert them for years (without a paper trail they can assert you never complained even though you did). Ultimately this is legally trumped if your W4 is correct, but it gives them room to push back and massively delay fixing it at their own cost. If you are back to working at the camera shop, tour employer has more incentive to fix it to keep you as an experienced employee that they pay peanuts. If you’re no longer working for them, *and they haven’t declared bankruptcy*, hiring a lawyer may be necessary to actually make progress. Part of the problem is that your employer and the payroll processor are playing the hot potato game rather than fixing the mistake, and it will likely get worse before it gets fixed.

If you’re interested in the second route, I need you to get your SSA statement that says how much you earned each year so we can see exactly when the error started. You will have to ask your employer for a copy of your W4 on file. If they know where it is, and you tell them that you think you can get the processor to waive the fee with it, they might help you by giving it to you (but I doubt it will be that easy). Then you need your taxes with the incorrect W2 info, plus the older ones with the correct W2, to prove the new processor was at fault. If you have any paper trail at all that shows you contacted someone when they started getting it wrong, and their response, that would be helpful, but isn’t necessary. We need all this in the next week or so to even decide if we can then start on pathway 2, or just want to go back to option 1 (much as my moral outrage is up, ultimately getting it fixed is much more important).

Sorry, I’m sure this is totally overwhelming of a response. Let me know what you are thinking, and I’ll help you do the actual math (I need weeks more you guess you will be unemployed, and number of years the w2 was wrong)