What is a W-2 Form and what should it include?

A standard W-2 Form that you submit to your company’s staff will include a number of sections. You, as the employer, need to fill these out in advance, not your employees. They simply send their form along to the IRS. The key sections of the W-2 include the following:

• Employer information: These sections should be filled out with data such as your employer identification number (EIN), your company or personal name, address and zip code, and your state ID number as an employer. You should also include the control number for the unique W-2 of your employee as it was assigned by your payroll system, if applicable.
• Employee information, earnings and withholdings: The rest of the W-2 Form should be filled out with information about your employee’s name, Social Security number, address and all applicable earnings and withholdings on your worker’s pay. These latter sections include income tax retentions, Social Security tax, Medicare withholdings and so forth.

Overall, the W-2 Form is quite simple and doesn’t usually require a lot of work to fill out. However, you should be careful to make sure that the wage and withholding information you’ve included is as precise as possible.

Annual Form W-2 deadlines for submissions

According to the IRS, you should send your current and former employees for the most recent tax year their W-2 Forms by January 31st of the following year. Your employees might not get their forms exactly on the 31st of January or before, but as long as you’ve sent them by that date, the speed of the postal service isn’t your worry.

One thing employers sometimes don’t know about W-2 Forms is that they also often need to submit several other copies of the same form for each employee. When the IRS provides its Form W-2 packet, it comes with several copies: 1, 2, A, B, C and D.

This might seem like a lot, but, per the IRS, you usually only need to send Copy A per employee to the Social Security Administration along with your Form W-3. Copy 1 is for any applicable state and local tax departments you might need to report to, and Copy D is for your own records. Copies B, C and 2 are for sending to your employee along with their W-4.

You may send the applicable W-2 Form copies to your employees any time before the 31st. You must also send these copies to them within 30 days of a request or within 30 days of an employee’s last wage payment, whichever comes later.

The consequences of missing your W2 deadline

The penalty for employers not sending W2 Forms can vary. If you forget to hand your employees their forms after they’ve requested them or by the IRS-mandated deadline, you might at first only have to deal with complaints from the employee. However, if they file a formal complaint with the IRS itself, it might trigger a fine or even possible future audits.

For example, if you’re late by 30 days or less after the submission deadline, a fine of $50 per late W-2 might get levied on you. This can tally up to a maximum total of $187,500 for a small business. So if you have a number of employees, try to be punctual. On the other hand, if you finally send out forms before August 1st of the next year but after the first 30 days following January 31st, your fine per W-2 deadline missed may jump to $100. After this, the maximum fine can go up to $260 for forms sent even later than the 1st of August.