Page 45 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

ESSENTIALS of Payr oll: Management and Accounting
goes into the employee’s personnel file. This is useful in case
an issue regarding employee benefits or rights arises at a later
date, and an employee claims to have no knowledge of the
issue, even though it is stated in the employee manual.
• Pay period schedule. The pay period schedule may be quite
obvious for salaried personnel, since it should always fall on
the same date; but employees who are paid on an hourly basis
must know when a pay period ends, and this can vary in
relation to the pay date. This is an especially common problem
when the timekeeping system is on a weekly basis and the
payroll system is on some other system, such as biweekly.
• Form W-4. Every employee must fill out IRS Form W-4, in

which they claim a certain number of allowances and, possibly,
additional tax withholdings. This information is needed in
order to compute their income tax withholdings. (Chapter 7,
“Payroll Taxes and Remittances” has a more in-depth discus-
sion of this form.)
• Form I-9. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
requires all new employees to fill out Form I-9, which is the
“Employment Eligibility Verification” form. A sample copy of
the form and its instruction sheet are shown in Exhibit 1.8.
This form serves two purposes. First, it requires the employer
to establish the identity of a new employee, which can be done
with a driver’s license, a variety of government identification
cards, a voter’s registration card, or a Native American tribal
document. Second, it requires the employer to establish that a
new employee is eligible to work, which can be done with a
Social Security card, birth certificate, Native American tribal
document, or an unexpired employment authorization docu-
ment. These two requirements can be satisfied with a single
document, such as a U.S. passport, certificate of U.S. citizen-
ship or naturalization, unexpired temporary resident card, or
several other documents that are specified in the exhibit.

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