Federal Legislative Updates
Additional Medicare subject wages corrected
The subject wages for Additional Medicare have been corrected in the following scenario:
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- Employee Medicare (00-000-0000-MEDI-000) is exempt (“isExempt”: true)
- Additional Medicare (00-000-0000-MEDI2-000) is not exempt (“isExempt”: false)
- The year-to-date wages (ytdWages) are below the $200,000 threshold
Previously, when the Employee Medicare tax was marked as exempt and the year-to-date wages were under the $200,000 Additional Medicare threshold, the engine would return subject wages for Additional Medicare even though the tax correctly returned $0. The engine will now return $0 for subject wages.
Note: This change only applies to the subject wages returned in the above scenario and may affect any existing unit tests around subject wages for the Additional Medicare tax.
The tax amount itself remains correct, and no change was made to the calculation.
Employer FICA subject wages corrected when only employee FICA is set up
Previously, when a user sets up only employee FICA (and not both employee and employer FICA), the engine would set the employer FICA year-to-date withholding (ytdWH) as $0. Now if only employee FICA is set up, employer FICA will correctly “copy” the year-to-date withholding amount (ytdWH) from EE FICA.
If only employee FICA is set up, the engine is meant to assume that the amount withheld for both has remained the same. To specify that the ytdWH differs between the two, both taxes should be set up independently.
This issue only affects users of STE2-style code or the STE Web API. Please also note that “FICA” within the STE refers to the Social Security portion; Medicare is set up as a separate tax.