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Posted by Stu Marckoon, Lamoine, January 18, 2011:

I may be the only one without a clue that is doing in-house payroll, but FYI, the amount of FICA withholding has changed from 6.2% to 4.2% (see IRS Publication 15).  The employer share is still 6.2%.  I've not seen any publicity about this from either the IRS or Social Security other than the aforementioned publication 15.  Did I miss something?

Responses: Stu you are right on and have not missed a thing.  So tell me how this helps the insolvency of Social Security?  :). (Mark Robinson, Fayette)

I never saw anything from IRS either...heard about change on the news, but had no idea the rate for employees and employers was going to be different. This is going to be a mess. And, hmmm, I thought we didn't have enough $$ to support SS. (Sedgwick Town Clerk)

Town of Madison has Trio as our software for payroll and they were on top of this change and had an email out to us by the end of December advising that they had the software updated to take care of this IRS mandate of 4.2% on EE's only. I did read something in one of the local papers but did not receive anything from the IRS. (Triss Smith, Madison)

It was talked about quite a bit but they never really came out and said it was the employee share of Social Security.  They kept saying it was a cut in employees income taxes which most people assumed meant the withholding tables were changing.  The 2% reduction is supposed to give employees an additional $1,000 in take home pay on average.  Of course that is only if you pay into Social Security.  In Bangor we do not and we do not have a Section 218 agreement so it was not a benefit to our full time workers.  In addition they removed the Making Work Pay credit from the tax tables which increased our withholding and reduced our take home pay.  Isn't great to work for a government. (David Little, Bangor)