Louisiana State Tax Withholding tables

[AndresEscalante]

After the update on July 1, 2024, I am now getting occasional employees with negative State Withholding tax, using LAS or LAM.  There must be an error in the tax table calculations.

[nickeypoo72]

Ope - my apologies, I was answering your earlier question regarding the exempt Louisiana status!! Sorry!  Also - I did trial run with one of our LA clients and I did not have the negative withholding like you mentioned.  I have several we will run next week.  I'll keep you posted if I have a similar issue.  Until there is a concrete solution, you may have to use withholding tables from LA Dept of Rev and manually change them....

Good question.  I tried it out and you are correct, it doesn't work.  Maybe you can add a new state withholding code for exempt and name it LAE perhaps?  You would have to figure out the coding though.  I'm not sure if you could copy & paste from a previous year's file that did work with the 99 exemptions to come thru as exempt?  

You could always call customer support.  But honestly, I've never had much luck with that.  Their support personnel usually don't understand how payroll tax tables work.  You know, like how the Head of Household tables are still non-existent... 😬

[AndresEscalante]

I have a weekly employee using LAS and 1 exemption.  She earned $57 gross this last week.  EasyACCT calculated negative $0.55 as Louisiana State Withholding.  So, now I have to check all low paid employees every time I run a payroll.  It also happened on another client with 3 employees.

[nickeypoo72]

I had a similar situation today with a low paid employee.  I have 4 other Louisiana payrolls to run today too so I will see if I can notice what is causing it with those as well.  Have you contacted EasyACCT customer support yet about it?

[nickeypoo72]

Okay!! I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with Intuit Easy ACCT customer service.  Lovely gal who was very patient and listened to what I had to say.  I believe I know what the problem is, but not how to fix it.  I hope she can relay that to the programmers and hopefully someone is also listening into this conversation.

On the LA Withholding Tables & Formula publication effective after January 1, 2022, there is a note at the bottom of the "COMPUTER FORMULA METHOD" page that states:

REMEMBER, IF ANY OF THE VARIABLES IN THE FORMULA ARE NEGATIVE, THE NEGATIVE VARIABLE SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ZERO

So, what i found out, plugging in all numbers into the listed formula, is that there comes a point where the total wage minus the personal exemptions equals a negative number.  Then when you multiply that negative number times the tax rate, you get another negative number.  Dividing the negative tax amount by the pay period, gives you that small amount of negative withholding tax.  It seems to only happen whenever you have someone claiming 1 or more exemption, because you subtract that low yearly wages from $4500 exemption and you get a negative earnings to multiply the tax rates on.

I hope that made sense!  But I think if you follow the formula method you will see what I'm talking about. 

Anyhow, I got an investigation number and a case number and hopefully within 24 - 48 hours I'll get an update and they will fix it. I don't want to think my time was wasted and they don't fix it.  Otherwise, I guess I'll have to try to figure out what line to enter on the tax table to get it fixed.

[nickeypoo72]

Update #2 on the LA Tax table issues... 

I never received a follow up email after my call last week.  So I called product support today.  The developers are aware of this issue and the next release should include the fix for it.  However, the gentlemen I spoke to did not have a time table when that could happen.  Could be next week or the week after.  

Also - side note - I could not get the 'Email product support' function from within the program to work.  The customer agent I spoke to today said that feature has been disabled.  There have been requests for it to be turned back on, but like the LA Withholding tax table issues, there isn't a timeline set for when that will happen.

So, sounds like next week we will need to manually review all negative withholding items and update per the LA Withholding Tax Tables from the LA Dept of Revenue website if our programs aren't updated yet.