New Hire Reporting For The Holiday Season

As we head into the holidays, we also head into an interesting employment season. Some industries prepare for year end, seasonal closures, while retail and restaurant hiring peaks at its highest point of the calendar year. Seasonal closures can create unemployment claim challenges, while the New Hire Reporting requirement gets onerous for employers with rapid ramp ups to their employee base.  During peak seasonal hiring, national retailers may hire as many as 250-300 new employees each day. That’s a lot of reporting, and there are fines involved for not properly doing so. Employers have 20 days to report newly hired and rehired employees to the state in which they work. The deadline is a federal mandate that drives data into the National Directory of New Hires which was designed to help better detect unemployment fraud and more effectively enforce interstate child support cases. Between the time pressure to respond and the collection of the data for individual state reporting, delivering new hire information can be a resource drain on your onboarding team.

For big companies, with multiple locations, year-end promotions and reorganizations often can require New Hire Reporting. For example, if an employer in Indiana completed a re-organization in November, moving 100 employees from one division to another with a new FEIN, the employer would likely need to report the 100 employees to the National Directory of New Hires. So what can employers do to minimize the reporting paperwork and remain compliant with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)? Make New Hire reporting part of the HR onboarding checklist.

  • Keep reorganizations and relocations in mind, and coach your teams on when it is considered a rehire that needs to be reported.
  • Create templates and processes to dispatch your New Hire Reports to the state at the same time you dispatch IRS forms and other state and federal forms.
  • Automate the process by outsourcing your New Hire Reporting to a third party vendor who can review and analyze your payroll file to capture and fulfill the reporting.

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