As part of your process of onboarding new employees, don’t forget that you need to file a New Hire Reporting Form with the State of Texas Attorney General’s Office. Federal and Texas state laws require that employers report all new hires and rehires within 20 days of when that employee starts earning wages. If you have employees that require W-2s, you should also be filing the New Hire Reporting Form for them.
The form itself is fairly easy to complete and can be found here. You can also file the form online by following the instructions here.
There is a penalty of $25 for each employee an employer knowingly fails to report and a penalty of $500 for conspiring with an employee to fail to file a report or submit a false or incomplete record.
If you find yourself in a situation where your organization has never filed this form, the Attorney General’s office recommends that you begin by reporting any new employees you’ve hired within the last 90 days and continue to report new hires and rehires within 20 days of their hire date (which is the first day services are performed for wages).
You may wonder what purpose this form serves. According to the Attorney General’s website, “the information compiled is compared against the names of child support obligors and recipients of public benefits for the purpose of improving child support collections and detecting fraud or abuse of public benefits programs.”
To learn more, please visit the Attorney General of Texas’ Website or call the Employee New Hire Reporting Operations Center at 1-800-850-6442.
Blog Post Written By Suzanne Kho, Executive Director of KTB.