Re: Employer Taxes Deducted from Employee Pay

It looks like you are going to have to choose between being unemployed
> or being part of at least a wage and hours violation. I hope you have > some proof that this system was devised and implemented by your boss, > otherwise he could end up blaming you for it.

I've thought about that. I don't necessarily think he would blame me for it, but I might just be naive. At any rate, I do have several people who can back me up if that were to happen, including some of the company shareholders and my previous boss (who left when the current boss started consulting with this company several years ago).

Of course the term "self-employement taxes" is meaningless in this > context. If the workers are self employed, they would pay their own > self-employment taxes, not the company. Of course as you say they are > not self employed, so this is just the employer cheating the employees > out of their wages.

This whole thing started when they were changing over all of the medical staff from independant contractors to employees, and they wanted to keep it all "cost-neutral" so I think THOSE employees were aware that this would be the process (instead of decreasing their regular hourly rate) and they were ok with it. However, this has continued to be my instructed procedure for doing everyone's payroll, which doesn't make sense to me for brand-new employees who were never contractors to begin with.

Most of the full-time employees don't even notice -- they have other legit benefit deductions every month so they're used to their "gross pay" being kind of... fuzzy. It's the part-timers who call me, wondering "I don't have any benefits or expenses, why doesn't my actual earnings match what is being reported as my gross pay?"

If you are not going to report this yourself (to the State and Federal > departments of labor) you need to stay out of the discussions with the > employees yourself, because when things get ugly, you don't want to be > the target of either the authorities or the employees wrath.

I don't discuss this with any of the employees. If people have questions, I refer them to my boss. I just have to deal with the vaguely "icky" feeling of doing something that I'm not entirely sure is ethical, month after month. I guess I just needed some idea of whether this was a big enough issue that I SHOULD be reporting it.