HR Compliance- Reporting New Employees

Every organization must comply with the employment law, rules and regulations of where it is based. To be able to achieve this, the HR should take an active approach in ensuring that the organization he represents meets all its legal responsibilities. This entails a lot for instance adhering to fair recruitment policies, preventing and also handling workplace discrimination as well as ensuring that employees are well paid.

HR compliance is very important. This is because failure to meet all its legal obligations means that the business is operating unlawfully or illegally, which could lead to industrial disputes and tribunal claims.

In matters pertaining reporting new employees, there are HR compliance requirements that must be met including completing certain required forms such as Form W-4 and Form 1-9. After going through the hiring process successfully and the candidate accept your job offer, employer’s next step should be completing the critical new employee forms that are necessary to satisfy the federal and state paperwork requirements that are imposed on employers. These forms include:

The Federal Form W-4 is that is required for withholding

The Form W-4, also known as the Federal Withholding Allowance Certificate, must be completed by an employer as part of payroll tax reporting requirements so that he can know how much federal income tax to withhold from his new employee’s wages. The completion of this form must be made a priority because already, the importance of having it filled has been overstated. Employers must take a stock of their payroll withholding obligations to understand how Form W-4 should be completed and how they should use it in doing payroll.

If an employee does not fill this form, the employer must go ahead to withhold tax as if the employee has claimed no exemptions. If again an employee does not indicate whether or not they are married, his employer should treat their marital status as single when withholding federal tax from their wages.

In many states, a copy of the signed Form W-4 must be sent to a state agency as part of the required information about new hires.

Reporting information for the new hires

All employers, even those with just one employee, are required by the law to report all new hires to the appropriate state agency. In turn, the state agencies will send over the information to a national directory of new hires, which is maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. Reporting is important for the following reasons:

• To help prevent unemployment compensation fraud
• To track down parents who owe child support.

The process is very simple and therefore easy for employers and all the information required is exactly what employees are required to provide when submitting a completed Form W-4. The employee’s name, address, social security number and your business name, address and federal employer identification number are basically what are needed.

New employee reporting is therefore very important. Employers should therefore be familiar with both benefits reporting requirements and eeo reporting requirements to ensure that they are meeting this legal obligation.

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