As part of our yearly maintenance contract with PeopleSoft, tax update changes are routinely delivered by the vendor throughout the year. These tax updates are tested and applied and are normally transparent to end users of SHARP. However, the most recent tax update provided by PeopleSoft includes several changes of which agency personnel will need to be aware. The changes include:

- Effective with SHARP paychecks dated on or after December 6,
2004, the employee’s Social Security Number will no longer be displayed on the paycheck stub. In response to legislation enacted and pending in other states as well as privacy concerns voiced by clients, PeopleSoft has eliminated SSN from the paycheck stub. Likewise, SSN has also been removed from the self-service paycheck view. SSN will be removed from the paycheck stub for Regents’ employees effective with paychecks dated on or after December 3, 2004.

- A new checkbox with text has been added to the Federal Tax Data
1 page (path ‘Compensate Employees’, ‘Maintain Payroll Data (US)’, ‘Use’, ‘Employee Tax Data’) to indicate that the employee is married but that taxes should be withheld at the higher single rate. The new checkbox is located in the ‘Federal Tax Status’ area of the page and includes the following text: “If married, but withholding at the single rate, select Single status and check here”. The new field will begin displaying on the Federal Tax Data 1 page on Tuesday, November 30 and the checkbox will initially be turned ‘off’ for all employees. Agencies will need to enter new effective-dated rows in order to turn the checkbox ‘on’ for any employees making this election on their Form W-4.

The changes noted above will be migrated to the SHARP production environment during the morning of Tuesday, November 30. It is anticipated that the migration will begin no later than 9:00 a.m. and is expected to be completed by noon. The SHARP system should be available to users during the migration period. However, please note that attempts to update the Federal Tax Data 1 page during the migration period will most likely result in an error message being generated. Agencies are advised to refrain from updating this page until after migrations are complete. In addition, self-service users may experience problems accessing the self-service pages during the migration period.

Questions regarding these changes should be directed to Payroll Services in the Division of Accounts and Reports.