Many Amazon sellers received an e-mail notification from Amazon this week with the subject “Disclosure to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration” stating that Amazon has been served with a legal demand from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA), and that the company has until November 6th to turn over all Amazon seller information and any tax identification numbers associated with those sellers.
In addition to payments to employees either as casual labor or as reimbursements, the auditor is also going to look at any payments to officers or any personal expenses that are being written out of the business, and in an effort to classify personal expenses as taxable wages. Let’s talk about that in a little bit of detail.
One of the biggest problems that we come across in payroll audits is employee reimbursements and independent contractor reimbursements. A lot of the times what will happen is an employee will get paid a normal paycheck and then they will spend their own money outside the context of the business to buy materials, to buy supplies, go post office do whatever. The business will write the employee a check out of their operating account and not run it through payroll.
After verifying payroll and payroll tax withholdings, the EDD will next go through and verify all the workers that the business issued 1099s to. This is what is known as the EDD Independent Contractor Test. First, the EDD auditor will go through each 1099 worker in detail, one by one. Even 1099’s that were issued to businesses, landlords and others that are clearly not subject to payroll tax withholdings, you can pretty much count on the EDD auditor going through each one and verifying who was issued a 1099.
In addition to the payroll verification test, the EDD will also look at personal income tax withholdings and make sure that the amounts listed match what the state has on file as well. Just to go back and clarify, the EDD audit is going looking at the wages and the income that the people earned. The EDD auditor is going through the payroll journal to make sure that the total wages is going to match. Now, this article discusses going through and doing a personal income tax withholding test.
Our last article, we discussed the purpose of the EDD audit initial interview questions. Those initial questions just kind of go through some of the background information on the business and help to explain that. After the initial interview, the EDD will conduct what they call a payroll test. The purpose of this article is to explain the payroll test and its function within the EDD audit.
In our last article, we examined the questions that are asked in an independent contractor audit. In this article, we would like to examine the purpose behind those questions in a little more depth.
The first thing that happens in an EDD independent contractor audit is the initial compliance interview. The initial compliance interview serves a couple of different purposes. Number one, it is to get background information on the client. Number two, it is to get answers in place for different questions in case there is any problems or factual disputes that come up later. For example, one of the questions they ask you is “How many locations do you have?”. That way if they later get information on a location that you did not disclose, you could potentially dig yourself into trouble.
During a payroll tax audit, the EDD is next going to go through the business’s general ledger in detail, the general ledger is important because the general ledger contains a record of all the payments the business made during the audit period in question. When the auditor goes through the general ledger, they are going to be looking for a couple of different things. Number one, is they’re going to be looking for payments to people. The auditor is looking for payments to people who may or may not have been a 1099 and they are going to be looking for payments to the business’s employees and toward 1099 contractors that were not listed on the W2 or the 1099 for whatever reason.