The Social Security Administration
is transforming its systems processing to increase capacity and
improve customer services, among other things, Tom Bricker, program
analyst and project manager at the agency, said May 7
during a pre-Congress workshop at the 2013
American Payroll Association Congress in Grapevine,
Texas.
Bricker said that electronic 2011
Forms W-2, which were filed in 2012, exceeded 86 percent of all W-2s filed.
For the first time, the volume of submissions made electronically
exceeded the number of paper submissions, he said.
For the 2012 filing season this
year, more than 1.2 million files with W-2s were submitted
electronically, and more than 90 percent of the Forms W-2
that were received electronically have been processed,
Bricker said.
Work has started on SSA's earnings
redesign project, Bricker said. The first stage involves internally
modifying some infrastructure issues, emailing rejection notices,
and then following up on those notices, he said.
By January 2014, there will be more behind-the-scenes activity, although Bricker said it was likely that employers
would be required to supply more information through the business
services online system.
Forms W-2 efile formats
are to be redesigned by mid-2014, Bricker said. By the end of tax year
2014, SSA will have stopped making unilateral edits to erroneously
reported Medicare amounts and will simply reject submissions, he
said.
A redesign of the business system's
online application will be noticeable to employers in January 2015
and is to be followed by a complete redesign of the website's Form
W-2c area by December 2015, Bricker said.
SSA still cannot process 3 percent
of the W-2s that get filed, and these earnings end up in a special
"suspense file" for possible reconciliation if new information
comes in, Bricker said. Most of these cannot be processed because
of mismatched names and Social Security numbers.
Bricker reminded attendees that if
there is no Social Security number given by an employee, a Form W-2
with zeros used for the SSN should still be filed.
By Michael Baer