This has nothing to do with the IRS. It’s your payroll department or the payroll service your company uses. The best thing would be for you to call someone there first thing Monday AM and get this straightened out.
I’m keeping about 92%. A great deal of my pay isn’t taxable, so I think it works out pretty well!
Federal: 313.23
SS: 259.08
Medicare: 60.59
Health Insurance: Free
Life Insurance: $34
Dental: 12
I get to keep $7176 out of $7844. No state tax.
Then why are you reporting both SS/Medicare and FICA. Those are one in the same so you’re essentially doubling what’s being taking out.
It’s as if (ignoring the actual arithmetic in the OP) your paycheck said…
FICA contribution $200
Employee contribution:
SS $50
Medicare $50
Company contribution:
SS $50
Medicare $50
and you were suggesting that you had $400 withdrawn for those taxes instead of $100. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of my employees come to me with, literally, the exact same concern. It’s not uncommon.
Typically IME, paystubs either list FICA or SS and Medicare, the fact that yours has both listed suggests that it’s just telling you how much you paid in FICA tax an breaking it out for you.
Yes, I know those numbers make no sense WRT how much money is actually contributed, I’m just making an example.
Assuming you’re accurately reporting what’s on your stub and calculating your take home percentage right (and not backwards), I’m interested to hear what your payroll department has to say about this.
Also, just to reiterate, your W-4 and state version of the W4 (what was that, DE 4, I think) has no bearing on FICA, just the state and fed withholding. You can neglect to turn it in, you can claim exempt, you can put down Married/10 for the exemptions and the FICA number will remain the same.
If I remember in the morning (hopefully I will if this thread pops up while I’m at work), I’ll have to see if I can mess with the FICA numbers (and specifically raise them) for an individual employee. Off the top of my head, I don’t think I can. IIRC that’s a company wide number and while I can, I think, over ride it, I beleive it just comes down with payroll updates, at least for Quickbooks.
How many employees does your company have? If it’s more than a few, you’d think other people would have said something.
BTW, you don’t owe any kind of back taxes or anything that would cause the government to step in and garnish your wages do you? That would typically be on the withholding side, but I’m just asking for due diligence.
If you had bothered to read the thread you’d have seen that FICA was a typo for Federal tax.
Also if you had bothered to read the thread people noted that SS was way too high, and he was getting federal tax withheld at the 35% level which is absurd. But double counting SS/FICA is not the issue.
FICA is Social Security and Medicare, at least according to two different accounting classes I took that covered payroll withholding.
That 31.5% might be Federal WH, but that seems like quite a high amount. Of course, I don’t know the OP’s tax bracket.
In CA, if you don’t file a separate DE-4, the employer uses the mandatory W4 to obtain such info as filing status and exemptions.
First paychecks can be fucked up and screwy.
I didn’t start my first job at the start of a pay period and it was also during thanksgiving so it was a 3 day week during the second week of a pay period and they too almost the whole goddam thing because their pay software figured my withholdings as if I had worked the entire pay period.
@Chessic. Are you working for small business that isn’t using ADP and might be using some free payroll app they got off the internet? Because those payroll apps don’t work very well sometimes if you don’t start working at the beginning of a pay period.
The numbers you would get if you worked 4 days but were taxed on a full two weeks of pay would be:
14.75 social security
3.625 medicare
Is your state tax rate 5% or thereabouts (a common state tax rate) because that would lead to the state tax rate you got if you were taxed on 2 weeks of pay but only got paid 4 days worth.
If that is the problem then your federal withholding rate should be about 12.6%
Most of the time you don’t even get medical insurance until your first full pay period but who knows how much your health insurance costs (this number might e correct)
Before I retired that was about my take home as well. (Perhaps as low as 60%). I was contributing 10% to my 401K and making low six figures, had good medical and dental, and buying the maximum life and disability insurance the company offered.
Is it possible that, despite working 4 days, they withheld as though you’d worked an entire pay period?
This seems to me like something you could approach your employer about for an explanation. There may be a clerical error that’s depriving you of money you’ve earned.
I’m betting that the OP has stupidly misunderstood something, and when he finds out about it, will not come back to admit such.
This does seem most likely.
This whole thread is quite interesting. It seems to me that it is illustrative of the political dichotomy that exists.
A person has a problem with a paycheque in that is seems too much money has been withheld for various taxes.
Person A blames “The government”. They rant about what a huge percentage the government has taken from their pay, and they are pissed off about this. They simply rant about “the government” and do not know how to fix the problem.
Person B realizes that “the government” does not run the company payroll system that withholds taxes. Furthermore, they are numerate enough that they realize that it does not make logical sense to have this much taken off, and the company payroll system must have made an error. They contact the company and correct the error.
It is my experience that person “A” is right=leaning politically, while person “B” is more left- leaning. The whole “government is at fault, and stole my money” is simply ingrained in the right-wing, and they see many things through this lens, without stopping to think logically.
Has Chessic Sense actually had a conversation with their company’s payroll team yet? Because, isn’t that the first thing anyone would do?
Yes, that is the first thing a logical person would do.
However, there are many whose first response would be: “The government took 62% of my paycheque!!!” I know this makes no sense, but for some, they don’t really understand how these things work.
Are there tips involved?
Restaurant workers typically receive cash tips at the end of each night, and the payroll withholding is done at paycheck time. Since tips are still subject to FICA and other taxes, the taxes do represent a large percentage of hourly wages and a large percentage of the paycheck, but that’s because the employee already took home most of their total pay (tips) each night in cash.
Because he’s lying. He found some site that babbled about how much “Uncle Sam is stealing from your paycheck”:rolleyes: with made up super high end numbers (nobody pays 14.9% Social Security tax), and made up a bogus rant about it.
That seems unlikely.
That doesn’t make sense either. FICA (SS/Medicare) is always a straight percentage (until and unless you reach the cap). The percentage always stays the same no matter how many days one works in a pay period. Bonuses and such are withheld at the same percentage as well.
As for Federal tax withholding, only working 4 days out of a two week pay period would result in less (percentage-wise) being withheld, not more. I’ve seen overwithholding happen in cases were a person was paid out for, say, vacation pay or back pay in addition to the regular pay periods’s earnings, which resulted in far too much being withheld because the system assumes that the employee is earning that much every pay period. Back in the dark ages when I did payroll, we had a manual override we could input to work around that.
Bottom line, talk to your company’s payroll folks, they’ve messed something up, and should be able to rectify it.
An entirely unsatisfactory solution, because then he would not be able to rant away about “The Government” and how terrible they are.
Sure. I’m totally speculating here. But my question is whether they might have figured out what should be withheld over, say, a 10-day pay period, and then erroneously withheld that greater amount from his 4-day workweek.
That still wouldnt explain how they withheld the wrong SocSec %.