State employees checking their W-2 forms last week found some of the numbers out of whack.
It was another attack of the BEACON payroll system.
A box that was supposed to have numbers in it, one showing the amount of pre-tax money set aside for dependent care was blank, while a box for distributions from a retirement plan should have been blank had numbers in it, Lynn Bonner reports.
Sherri Johnson, spokeswoman for the state controller's office, said the mistakes found their way into 17 percent of employee tax forms, or about, 17,000.
The office sent notes to state agencies' human resources and payroll departments, and to employees with computer access who log their own time, saying new W-2s were being printed and delivered.
It took two employees a day to fix a "configuration switch" that was not set correctly, Sherri Johnson, spokeswoman for the state controller’s office, wrote in an email.
Johnson made a point of noting the old payroll system had its problems with W-2s. About four or five years ago, all W-2s from central payroll put “deceased” in the employee boxes, Johnson wrote, and all the forms had to be reprinted.
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Re: Beacon flubs state taxes
For the first time, all W-2s were mailed (in some cases twice) to employees. In past years, these were sent to the agencies and handed out. In these tight budget times, why did the state go to the extra expense of mailing these forms to employees? Wouldn't it have been much less expensive to distribute them through the agencies? Or even better, why did officials not ask employees to print their own W-2 from the system in the same manner as their monthly payroll vouchers?