Paychex Payroll Processing Negligence Rochester New York

We had our payroll processing done with Paychex in 2018 and 2019. During that time I was never informed that there were any issues in submitting WH-1 or WH-3 reports to the Indiana Dept of Revenue on our behalf.

In January of this year, Harold Melton, Senior Payroll Specialist, emailed me that we were not registered with Indiana to have withholding taxes on our account. This was the first I’d heard anything about not having withholding on our account or that there was an issue in reporting taxes.

We subsequently paid all of the taxes, plus fees, plus interest that the Indiana Dept of Revenue said that was owed on our account, which totaled $x,xxx,xx. This was paid on April 1, 2020. 

In mid-September, I was notified again by the Indiana Dept of Revenue that they didn’t have our WH-3 information on file. I ended up entering every person’s information who worked for us in 2018 and 2019.

At the beginning of October 2020, we received a WH-3 late fee bill for 2018 and 2019 from the Indiana Dept of Revenue for $xxx.xx.

I emailed Harold about this in October 2020 to find out if these reports were ever submitted. He said, “everything ever submitted to the Department of Revenue on your behalf was rejected.” I asked him who should have communicated this error to me. He said it should have been done by our payroll specialist who at the time was Jasmine Moore. She never communicated any of these problems to us ever.

Now we’re left with another late fee bill from the Dept of Revenue for $xxx.xx for errors that were not caused by Texy Mexy, in addition to the penalties and interest, we paid in April.

I made multiple calls and sent multiple emails to Rachel Vanscooter, Client Services Supervisor, and Jamillah Abdullah, Client Services Supervisor. Rachel replied to my first email to find out what the issue was and no response or communication has taken place by Paychex since then.

Additionally, we stopped using Paychex to process our payroll in early 2020 for many more reasons.

There were a number of mistakes in the handling of our payroll in 2019, including attempting to pay our former employees who have the same last name as current employees, rather than paying the current employees, attempting to charge for processing mistakes that required multiple processing runs in one week that was no fault of our own and over-charging us for invoices and workers comp processing.

Further, we had three CSR’s assigned to our account over 2019. Rarely, was the one assigned to our account the one to handle the processing. When there were errors, it was difficult finding the right person to talk with to correct the mistake.

We hire professionals to do work that is not in our expertise and we hired Paychex to handle our payroll processing and taxes. These fees come from a lack of communication and negligence on Paychex part and it is my expectation that they will reimburse us for these late fees and interest amounts.