The NASPP Blog

December 31, 2008

First on Your 2009 “To Do” List

When you come back to work, it will be a new year! Now that Robyn has given you the top 10 New Year’s Resolutions, you should be ready to tackle this upcoming year. There are just a few administrative tasks that you’ll want to make sure and complete right away.

The most urgent is: Don’t forget to reset all year-to-date tax amounts that are kept in your stock plan administration system for all countries with a tax year ending on December 31st. It is especially important to reset the Social Security paid year-to-date for your U.S. employees. Most, if not all, stock plan administration databases will use this amount to determine if Social Security tax should be withheld on a transaction. If your system also tracks the year-to-date supplemental income amount, this should also be reset to zero. This amount is used to determine if the U.S. minimum statutory federal income tax withholding rate is 25% or 35%. For more information on tax withholding on stock plan transactions, you may want to review our Tax Withholding and Reporting portal.

You will also want to coordinate with your payroll and HR departments to confirm that these year-to-date amounts are being reset; especially if you are getting any automated feeds from either system that will impact your tax withholding rates. Confirm with your payroll department if there have been any changes to local income tax withholding rates both in the U.S. and internationally. Check in with your HR group to see if any changes are being made to subsidiary or location codes, or any other identifier that you are pulling from your HR database to segment your employee population.

Your final payroll run for the U.S. and other countries with tax years ending on December 31 will be coming up soon, as well. For a review of what that should entail, check out my blog entry on year-end employee tax withholding reconciliation.

NASPP “To Do” List

Just to make sure that you keep Barbara’s NASPP “To Do” list in mind as we head into the new year, let me include mine this week:

  • Renew your NASPP membership for 2009!

-Rachel