Denver Business Daily

Where do I get ever changing payroll tax rates for federal, states and local and county?

I am developing a payroll software. Federal, State and Local taxes keep changing. How do I get these tax changes?

Public Comments

1. You can continuously scan the federal, state, city, county, township, etc changes This is very difficult!! For example: on one implementation we were concerned whether a township taxes were being pulled correctly and I called the township directly and asked what it was. That answer I was given was "at tonight's township meeting, they are retroactively voting on what it is going to be". true story. Most payroll systems connect to 3rd party tax software. The biggest being BSI (www.bsi.com) and Vertex (www.Vertex.com). Instead of trying to determine how to maintain all the individual tax rates, I would spend my time on what makes your software unique and why someone should use it instead of the gazillion of choices a company already has.
2. One of the principal values of payroll software (and a significant income stream for the vendors of such software, via update subscriptions) is the regular updates of tax rates for the customer. This is where the rubber meets the road for software publishers. Most tax authorities now maintain e-mail lists that you can subscribe to for updates on tax rates and laws. For those that don't, you'll need to check regularly for changes to the laws and tax rates to update your systems and keep your customers current. You may also be able to subscribe for consolidated information updates from services like CCH and then resell this to your customers.