Maine Paid Family Medical Leave calculating incorrectly

@SM DAmore  Just to clarify, but can you provide some hard numbers here as an example?

Asking as .05% is definitely not half of 1%.

Thank you for reaching out to us regarding the Maine PFML program withholding issue on QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT), SM DAmore.

I understand the issues you're experiencing with under-withholding due to the rate calculation error, and I'm here to help you sort this out.

Can you check how you entered the Maine PFML rate in QuickBooks? Was it as a decimal or a percentage? Please remember, if it's in percentage form, it should be divided by 100 to convert it to a decimal. Updating this in your payroll item can help ensure the tax is calculated correctly.

If you're looking to correct the paycheck right away, I can guide you through the process of making a liability adjustment. Here’s how we can proceed:

1. Go to the Employees menu, then Payroll Taxes and Liabilities, and select Adjust Payroll Liabilities.
2. Select which adjustment is for.
3. Choose the employee.
4. Complete the Taxes and Liabilities fields.
5. Select Accounts Affected and then OK.

For detailed guidance on how to enter adjustments to payroll liabilities, please refer to this article: Adjust payroll liabilities in QuickBooks Desktop.

You can also explore this resource for more information about Maine Paid Family Leave Program.

Moreover, you can generate payroll reports to access valuable insights about employee wages, taxes, and deductions. This information is relevant for tax filing purposes.

I'm glad we could work through the steps to address the withholding discrepancies together, SM DAmore. Please don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything else I can assist you with. 

Thanks Fishing.

I have attached how the PFML rates appear in the Payroll Item List.  The 0.5% seems to me to be 1/2 of 1% when you look at how Medicare is represented in the list.

Then, if you were to look at the paycheck clip (which I will send separately), you will see that Quickbooks is actually calculating at a rate of 0.05% (that is, they are adding a decimal place.)  

These rates are controlled by Quickbooks - there is no way for the user to change.  

Fishing:  Attachment #2

Hello Glinette - Quickbooks autofills the rate and I don't see that it can be changed by the user.  Please see my response to Fishingforanswers for more detail.

Thank you.

@SM DAmore  Yikes. You're definitely correct; that's off by two orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately, there's nothing to do for the core issue until QB realizes what one of its pet programmers has done.

Fortunately-ish, you are able to overwrite the tax amounts in that window. It's far from ideal, having to multiply the gross by 0.005 by hand every time, but even hardcoded % taxes like Medicare and Social Security will allow the user to overwrite them. At least your paychecks will be correct.

Careful that QB doesn't keep trying to 'correct your mistake' after the adjustment, though.

I'm actually more curious about the fact that it appears to have been working prior to this paycheck. Going by the YTD totals, it looks like the prior paycheck of $320.00 gross did yield the appropriate $1.70 in 0.5% tax.

Maybe a payroll update between now and your last paycheck messed up the calculations for this tax.

@SM DAmore  A pox on our inability to edit our own posts.

Meant to say the prior $340.00 gross, not $320.00 gross.

The prior with holding is correct.because I overrode the quickbooks calculated amount!

Thanks for your reply, Fishing, because it might confirms my suspicion that the fix is with the Quickbooks programmers....

To summarize the solution: 

Even though the Payroll Item List shows the correct rate (0.5%) for "ME - Paid Fam Med Leave Emp." Quickbooks has AUTOFILLED the rate on each employees card 0.05% which is 1/10th of that.

For employers to rectify that they must go into each employee and correct the rate....

NOTE TO QUICKBOOKS:  This is clearly an error on the part of the QB programming and I am lucky that I have small clients with few employees.  I would hope that, in the future, the program would populate employee information with the default rate in the payroll item list.