Hi marciastutz,

I apologize for that - that is frustrating. There was a tax update released January 18th, 2018 that had the new federal tax tables for 2018. You can find more information about this here:

https://support.na.sage.com/selfservice/viewdocument.do?noCount=true&externalId=25172

There were a total of 9 tax updates released in 2018, the latest in June as states were finalizing their budgets and tax changes. If you installed any of these tax updates after January 18th, your federal tax tables would be up to date.

Payroll creates a backup with a time stamp when you update your taxes - to confirm when your taxed were updated, browse to your company folder then into the BackupTax folder. If any of the files in there have a on or after January 18th, you had the new tables.

Also, there have been many articles published online about how those tables are affecting taxpayers - the new tables for the most part reduced the amount of federal withholding tax from the paycheck, however at the end of the year taxpayers are owing more because of this. Here is a link to an article from CBS News:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-taxpayers-could-wind-up-owing-for-2018/

To ensure you have the latest information, you will want to subscribe to the Notices, Annoucement and Alerts forum:

https://sagecity.na.sage.com/support_communities/sage_construction_and_real_estate/f/sage-cre-announcements-news-and-tips

Click More and Turn Forum Notifications On and you will receive emails when an announcement is posted.

Thanks!

I did do a tax update on 1/19/18. But those were not the most recent tax tables for 2018 that the IRS has out now. The tax brackets on that update that were used all year for payroll were: (I’m not listing the whole table, just the Single one for reference):

The tax brackets that the IRS is using for 2018 tax returns:

I got that bracket from this link (need to scroll down to get to it):

https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/compensation/pages/fica-social-security-tax-2018.aspx#article-section-8

That second bracket is what is being used on income tax software – I manually calculated taxes for a couple people using that bracket, and it was consistent with what several different tax software programs (Tax Slayer, Turbo Tax) are using.

I've done a lot more figuring this morning, and I think that the tax tables in payroll are doing essentially the same thing as the published brackets.

And I also see that the tax tables in payroll are what was published in the IRS Circular E. So I don't think Sage was to blame for missing anything (which is what I said in my original post).

I do think the IRS hasn't done a good job of setting up their tables they published in the Circular E though, either in 2018 or 2019. The tables are still having you deduct a personal exemption amount for the number of withholdings you have, but unless I'm really missing something, they shouldn't be doing that anymore since Personal Exemptions went away in 2018. It seems like their tables should subtract a flat amount based on Single vs. Married, since the number of people in your family is irrelevant on basic tax returns now. 

Just as some examples: I had to pay in $1100 extra in federal tax this year, and last year I only had to pay in $67. Another employee has to pay in $3300 this year, and only paid in $930 last year. It doesn't make sense that the amount of tax withheld from our checks is so wildly different than what we end up owing, when neither of us changed our number of exemptions in the past year.