 Income tax 2023-2024. Income, line one, including W2 wages and tip income. Get ready and some coffee because we often have to handle some unpleasant sensations when doing income tax preparation. 2023-2024. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't want to be seen with us. But that's okay, whatever, because our merchandise is better than their stupid stuff anyways. Like our, trust me, I'm an accountant product line. Yeah, it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep, complex and nuanced questions. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. Most of this information can be found in the line instructions section of the Form 1040 Instructions Tax Year 2023 which you can find on the IRS website at irs.gov, irs.gov. Looking at the income tax formula, we're focused once again on line one income. Remembering that the first half of the income tax formula is in essence a funny income statement and income statement having income minus expenses resulting in the bottom line of net income. The funny tax income statement having income minus deductions getting to taxable income as opposed to the net income. Also note that the income line item could be quite expansive. We're going to have questions as to what should and what should not be included in the income line item noting that for taxes everything is flipped on its head. So we would like to have income as low as possible because that will typically result in taxable income being as low as possible which will result in less taxes. We also have to consider if there's other tax rates for certain types of income. Ordinary income tax rate, the normal progressive tax schedules versus possibly capital gain tax rates or dividend, qualified dividend tax rates for example. Here's the income page one of the Form 1040. You can see it's quite expansive with the different line items that might be included in income. Here's the schedule one which feeds into page one of the Form 1040 with additional income line items. Now typically when we're doing a tax return the first thing that we think of when we think of income is the W2 form. Why? Because most people are employees of somebody else and we know that the employer has the obligation to produce the W2 form and we also note that they have the obligation typically of doing withholdings of both the federal income taxes as well as the social security and Medicare. That means the employer is doing the tax collecting job of the government. Instead of the employee being responsible completely for their own tax obligations the employer has been made into the agent to collect the taxes and this W2 form then is going to be reporting what the employer did meaning they're going to give this to the employee so the employee can be a good taxpayer and put it on their Form 1040 and they gave a copy to the IRS to make sure that the taxpayer is a good taxpayer and put this information properly on the Form 1040. Note then that something like a W2 form is not something that you could basically put something different on the tax return from the W2 form without almost inevitably getting some kind of letter from the IRS because it's not like the IRS has to randomly select your tax return to determine if there's some kind of incongruity because they have the W2 form. The computer can basically check as to whether your tax return lines up to the tax forms they have been provided. That means that if there's an error with the W2 form, something's wrong with it then you're going to have to fix it with the employer typically because it's going to be a lot more difficult to fix it with the IRS. So if there's a problem with the W2 form then what your first go to would be go into the employer and say hey you have to fix this because you gave a copy to the IRS and if I report the wrong numbers that you put on the W2 form then if I report the right numbers it's going to get hit for sure almost for sure with a problem. So if you can't do that then you might have to deal with the IRS side of things but that's usually going to be the remedy that you're going to be looking into. Now also note we're dealing with federal income taxes with the Form 1040. However, their payroll taxes are also federal taxes to the degree that their Social Security and Medicare taxes. Normally with a W2 type of taxpayer they've already paid properly the Social Security and Medicare so it's just a reporting form and it's not going to add or cause any kind of changes to your calculations usually. However, you could imagine situations where you have someone who has two W2s and they go over the Social Security limit because there's a cap on it in which case Social Security could have an impact on your federal income taxes. And we also know that Social Security has an impact on your Form 1040 if you have self-employment income which is often the case for sole proprietors so that's the most common case when you're filing a Schedule C. So that adds a significant level of complexity when you have to deal with Social Security on like a self-employment system. So again, your question is as a tax preparer, do I want to prepare tax returns that are typically lower income tax returns which are driven by these forms? Everything's basically automatic, systematic. I crank out as many as I can. I have a lower profit margin but I do a lot of returns versus do I want to take on some of these more complex situations where I have to deal with the Schedule Cs and things that aren't always reported nice and neatly on these forms in which case I'll charge more money for it. I'll take on more risk sometimes because more likely there's going to be problems with those types of returns and I'll get a higher profit margin. So those are the things you want to keep in mind as a tax preparer. What's your business model and then think about which clients you want to pick up noting that if you're in a higher tax bracket system as well, it's often not worth your time then to take up low income tax returns because they can be quite complex in their own way because they have the earned income credit and the child tax credit often family structures that could be difficult to deal with and could have citizen issues and whatnot which are all complex issues to deal with it if you don't have your model set up to do that if your model is dealing with high income individuals and if your model is set up to systematically deal with those types of issues on the low income side of things then when a high income person comes in it might not be worth your time to do that one client and spend all your time doing these issues that aren't with your normal client base. So again, your goal is to say no to people that are trying to clients that want to get into your business when they don't fit your business model you have to be able to say no to those people so here's just a mock W2 just to get an idea of these first boxes because these are the most important ones typically so we've seen box one it has to do with the federal income taxes so note when you're looking at those wages there's the data input that we do for the tax return and there's also questions that you might have from your client for like other reasons tax planning and just general questions about their income so if you want to know how much someone earned for example box one might not be the best box to go to because this is your wages for federal income tax purposes and you might have had something taken out of it such as possibly medical insurance or possibly a 401k plan or some kind of retirement plan so oftentimes box five is actually a better indication of your highest income level although it could have still been reduced by some items as well because you're talking about Medicare wages but the Medicare wages aren't typically reduced by like a 401k plan and therefore that's the one that usually is you might see as the actual wages box one is the one that we're going to use most commonly with the form 1040 because this is your income subject to federal income taxes and then box two are the taxes that was withheld from box one where the employer was responsible for making those withholdings but doing so in accordance with what the employee told them with possibly the W-4 form the social security has to do with the social security taxes this is your social security income which could be different than box one but could be the same for lower income taxpayers it will typically often be the same unless there was a deduction for box one of things like benefits like a 401k plan if not then you would think the social security would be the same until it hits a cap on the higher income side now this you're going to put this into the system so your tax software can determine if there's any issues with social security but typically the tax has already been paid and typically the tax has been paid correctly because it's basically more of a flat tax whereas the federal income tax is that confusing progressive tax which is impossible to pay the exact amount of tax therefore we try to overshoot on the federal income tax we file the 1040 to get a refund hopefully of a bit of that overpayment the social security has been paid in full typically therefore no actual impact on the tax return it's just a reporting information and the Medicare basically same thing meaning the employee the employers forced to take the Medicare out of the employee wages it's more of a flat tax therefore it's already been calculated so you have it on the W-2 for informational purposes you will put it into the tax software but it might not have an impact on your return as the federal income tax withheld certainly will now we have a higher earner here so box one is at 170,000 box two the withholdings of the federal income taxes which are going to be taken by the employer based on the information given by the employee typically in the form of the W-4 form 42,500 the social security wages are at 160,200 now this is lower than box one how can that be the case because you would think that box one would normally be lower because they might have put some money into for example a 401k plan where you would have compensation not included in box one which might be included in box three however the social security has a cap to it meaning if you get over a certain level you no longer pay taxes beyond that threshold now from a just a tax law standpoint people will often question that policy and say well that is really strange you would think that as income goes up they would pay more tax that's what the progressive income tax system does that is usually applied to the federal income taxes how can it be that the social security taxes actually get captured you stop paying taxes over a certain dollar amount and that's basically because my rationale or my thought process with this would be well the social security is basically being thought of as kind of a federal retirement program as opposed to a safety net or benefit program at this point and if it was a retirement program you would think that the more money you put into the retirement plan the more you would get out in the form of benefits at retirement age in this case in the form of social security benefits however because it's kind of part benefit program and part retirement plan as you put more money in your benefits go down and down until if you put more money in over a certain dollar amount you're not actually getting any benefit when you get the benefits at retirement and that's kind of why we have this weird kind of thing with the social security wages and to me again it kind of has to do with the idea of whether we're dealing with a safety net program so that people who can't say for retirement have a safety net versus a kind of retirement program that everybody should be participating in now also note that this is a flat tax one hundred sixty thousand two hundred times point oh six two that's how we get to let me do that again I think I got it wrong here one hundred and one hundred and one hundred and one hundred sixty I can't type right one hundred and sixty thousand two hundred times point oh six two gets us to the nine nine three two so that's what we mean by it being a flat tax but then it's capped at the one hundred and sixty thousand two hundred now the Medicare typically isn't capped so in this example we're going to show it at just to show that we have these three numbers that are wages the Medicare different if you go above a certain level you might actually have added Medicare taxes but the Medicare seems more like a a welfare program or a safety net program as opposed to just a benefit for everyone and you can tell by the tax rate because it's a lot lower right one hundred and seventy thousand times point oh one four five one point four five percent so that's at the two thousand four sixty five also note that with these two wages so these two taxes the employer is also matching paying on their side at attempting to mirror kind of the idea of a 401k plan which is often a structure for a 401k plan so you can see in the design when they set this up like in the nineteen thirties that they were trying to kind of mirror a 401k plan kind of idea in the structure of it so you can see that that the taxes for the Medicare could be the highest now let's go to the next example so now we have all three of these boxes different so we're at the one hundred and seventy thousand and then we had the one hundred and sixty thousand two hundred and then the Medicare wages is the highest how did that happen well you can see the wages up top are one hundred and seventy thousand and then down here we have the ten thousand that's the difference in this case between box one and box five why because we're gonna imagine that that ten thousand was money put into a 401k or some kind of retirement plan so that meant that it wasn't included in wages for box one but box three that ten thousand would have been included in the social security wages however it hit the cap at one hundred and sixty thousand two hundred and then the Medicare wages that ten thousand is included so that's why you get the one hundred and seventy plus the ten thousand and that's why again the Medicare wages although not a perfect representation of actual income is actually closer to the actual compensation oftentimes than box one because box one although we use it for taxes has been reduced oftentimes by a significant amount for a 401k plan oftentimes amongst possibly other things all right so line one a total amount from forms w two box one enter the total amount from forms w two box one if a joint return also include your spouse's income from forms w two box one so on the tax return we could have multiple w twos from one person possibly from multiple people if you have a married situation now it used to be that you had you had simpler returns because you often had one person working at one company for their entire life for the whole family now that's not the case one person could be working five different jobs with different w twos jumping around all over the place and of course the spouse could be doing the same thing so caution if you earned wages while you were an inmate in a penal institution report these amounts on schedule one line eight you so for all of our criminal penal institution of members out there keep that one in mind so do not report these wages online one a see the instructions for schedule one line eight you caution if you received a pension or annuity from a non qualified deferred compensation plan or a non governmental section four fifty seven b plan and it was reported in box one of form w two do not include this amount on form ten forty line one a this amount is reported on schedule one line eighteen so those are kind of unusual situations all right line one b household employee wages not reported on forms w two so if you're in a situation where your household employee it's possible that you're you're even though you're basically an employee that you might not be required to get a w two form because it's kind of a pain for the person that's higher you know it this system is a problem for the person who is the pay or right it makes it life difficult for the pay or which usually is a corporation so so the iris like whatever will make them do it but a sole proprietor even that it's difficult to deal with the w two wages and if you're just hiring someone to help you out with your housework and what not then again it could be difficult to comply with the w two requirements in that kind of situation so maybe sometimes you're not required to have the w two requirements and you still have to include your income however in those cases so into the total of your wages received as a household employee that was not reported on form or forms w two an employer isn't required to provide a form w two to you if they paid you wages of less than two thousand six hundred in two thousand twenty in two thousand twenty three wages received less than two thousand six hundred then you didn't get this is another area which is kind of similar to like the the hair salons and the restaurants and the nail salons the massages places where the person that's paying in those cases is not actually another business they're paying for personal things that they are receiving oftentimes paying in cash and therefore it's a problem for the iris because because the iris is going to have less ability to double check that those businesses are reporting their income because they could have gotten paid in cash because they can't pressure the person making the payment to provide a double you to form because that person doesn't get a deduction on their tax return and therefore you you don't have the leverage so so that's why that's why my conspiracy theory is they went after them during covid because the iris hates those businesses and wanted to shut them all down and so if you were in a massage parlor during covid the iris shut you down but they they happen to like their household employees so so so they make an exception for that one there's those so any case any case the same kind of thing happens here for if you hire and an employee because that's really a personal expense so even though they're basically an employee you're not really a business you might not get a deduction for their the work that they did you might get a credit or something like possibly but so it's going to be more difficult for the iris to require that w2 form even though you don't get a w2 form you should still report you know the income is the general idea so for information on employment taxes for household employees you can see tax topics 756 for more information line C tip income not reported on line 1 a into the total of your tip income that was not reported on form 1040 line 1 a this should include any tip income you didn't report to your employer and any allocated tips shown in box 8 on your forms w2 unless you prove that your unreported tips are less than the amount in box 8 so did you put one of those tips in your pocket without logging it in without logging it down shame on you allocated tips aren't included as income in box 1 C publication 531 for more details also include the value of any non-cash tips you received such as tickets passes or other items of value although you don't report these non-cash tips to your employer you must report them on line 1 C now tips is another area which is a become a huge problem or the iris again kind of cracks down on the business models that used to work because you have this cash situation in this tip situation primarily in other words if you own the restaurant or if you own a bar or something like that a nice business model is to say hey look I'm going to hire people that are good servers and I'm going to pay them in tips and the and basically if they're good servers they're going to get better tips and that'll be better for the restaurant it'll be better for the employee and we're going to attract people that like to like to work and earn tips right however the iris is like well those tips are often cash and we can't see that that you've reported the tips and so on and so and so we would like to have information about that so they want to force the employer to be the tax enforcing mechanism so how can they do that ironically the minimum wage kind of helps them to do that because they're going to say well you have to pay a minimum wage which which they if they keep on jacking up you know the the minimum wage then that you can no longer do that business model because they were getting paid in tips which the employer wasn't including in their income right so if you have to pay a substantial minimum wage then you can't have a business model where they just going to earn tips so the minimum wage actually kind of crushed the tips business which was kind of the backbone of a lot of small businesses or people that are kind of entering into the workforce oftentimes and then they also want the employer to report the tips in some way so if you worked at a restaurant sometimes the employers regard has to pool the tips has to report the tips so that they do report them on your W2 income so if they're on your W2 income then you will have them that's a situation where the employer had to be the tax collector so now they were put into the middle of what they didn't want to be involved in which is the collection of the tips so that so that the IRS can basically collect the taxes on that also tips are a cash based thing which again is hard for the IRS to enforce so if you get a cash tip and you put it in your pocket then you know it's going to be a little bit more difficult for the IRS to enforce there's no audit trail basically until you put it on your bank unless you don't you may not put it on your bank and there's no there's no reporting documentation unless they can get the employer in the middle of it to report it somehow and any case tip you may also but the bottom line is that if you get tipped it should be income whether you get a form about whether you got it or not is the general the general rule so tip about tips you may owe Social Security and Medicare or Railroad Retirement R RTA tax on unreported tips as well keep that in mind see the instructions for Schedule 2 line 5 okay line 1 D Medicare waiver payments not reported on forms W 2 box 1 so enter your taxable Medicaid this is Medicaid I'm sorry not Medicare Medicaid waiver payments not reported on forms W 2 box 1 enter your taxable Medicaid waiver payments that were not reported on forms W 2 also enter the total of your taxable and non-taxable Medicaid waiver payments that were not reported on forms W 2 or not reported on box 1 of forms W 2 if you choose to include non-taxable payments and earned income for purposes of claiming a credit for other tax benefits so you have this situation with the Medicaid again it could be something that possibly could be included in income you might want to do a little bit more research if you're in that situation when they talk about this item down here so if you choose to include non-taxable payments in earned income why would you do that usually earned income is bad and because it results in higher net income and higher tax well sometimes if you have an earned income credit for example you have certain credits were actually if your income goes up you might have a tax benefit from it we'll talk about some of those credits in future presentations and some things you might have the choice then of whether or not you want to include something as income or not possibly because there could be a tax benefit due to say credits for example so if you and your spouse both receive non-taxable Medicaid waiver payments during the year you and your spouse can make different choices about including payments in earned income for more information you can see instructions for schedule 1 line 8 so line e taxable dependent care benefits from form 2 4 4 1 line 26 enter the total of your taxable dependent care benefits from form 2 4 4 1 line 26 dependent care benefits should be shown in box 10 of your forms W 2 so typically again that'll usually be on the W 2 and if it is on the W 2 then the employer was the one that was forced to do all the work basically and reported to you and the iris of the W 2 and as you enter this into your software there should be data input forms for it so the more the stuffs on the W 2 the easier and more automated usually tax preparation will be but first complete the form 2 4 4 1 to see if you can exclude part or all of the benefits so here's the 2 4 4 1 child and the parent dependent care expenses and so you can take a look at it as well as the instructions related to it on the iris website iris dot gov iris dot gov if you are in that situation line 1 F employer provided adoption benefits from form 8 8 3 9 line 29 so this is somewhat unusual of a situation where you have the adoption benefits but they could be significant in certain situations so enter the total of your employer provided adoption benefits from form 8 8 3 9 line 29 employer provided adoption benefits should be shown in box 12 of your forms W 2 with the code T so you're probably not going to see that often but again the employer has been forced to basically do the work on this one and it'll be on the W 2 and you basically if it's on the W 2 with the T then you can look at the instructions for it on the form W 2 on the iris website and pretty easily hopefully figure out where to go from there but see the instructions form 8 8 3 9 to find out if you can exclude part or all of the benefits so you may also be able to exclude amounts if you adopted a child with special needs and the adoption became final in 2023 so clearly the tax code is being used in some to some degree here to try to incentivize certain behavior such as adoptions for example so in those cases you want to see what kind of benefits would be available and these are some starting points for the research there this is form 8 8 3 9 of the top of it at least qualified adoption expenses you can take a look at this form and instructions at the iris website iris dot gov iris dot gov line 1 g wages from form 8 9 1 9 line 6 into the total of your wages from form 8 9 1 9 line 6 there line 1 h other earned income tip if you received scholarship or fellowship grants that were not reported to you on W 2 report these amounts on schedule 1 line 8 are so in those cases you can see the instructions for schedule 1 line 8 are so other earned income you have to be careful with the other income because you you can imagine situations where you have income that the iris is general rule is that everything has to be included in income unless there's an exception if there's not a line item designated for that type of income it would have to go into other income be careful however of other earned earned income versus like income that's going to be subject to self employment so if you have another income situation the question is is this income that is subject to basically self employment in which case you're also going to possibly have the schedule s e and you're going to have social security and Medicare possibly calculated on it or is it income that's not subject to self employment in which case it's going to be included for income tax purposes but hopefully not for the calculation of the social security and Medicare in the form of self employment tax so just a note just be careful when you when you're looking at those income line items that don't have a designated area and you're trying to put them in other income are they subject to to self employment tax or not the following types of income must be included in the total online one H so strike or lockout benefits other than bonafide gifts excess elective deferrals the amount deferred should be shown in box 12 of form W2 and the retirement plan so now we're talking about box 12 and you're talking about one of the big benefits for an employee being putting money into typically a retirement plan of the 401k or a 403 B or something like that now you only have a amount up to a certain degree that you can put into those benefit plans and it's possible that you can put more into the plan why do you put money into a retirement plan because you get a tax benefit typically at the point that you put it in meaning it's not going to be included in box one of the W2 and therefore you're not going to pay federal income taxes on it however you will pay federal income taxes on it when you pull the money out so it's a deferral that's why we call it a deferral right but there's a cap on how much money you can put in and any given year it's usually fairly high for a retirement plan however so so box 12 retirement box 12 so if the total amount you or your spouse if finally jointly deferred for 2,023 under all plans was more than 22,500 so fairly significant amount excluding catch-up contributions as explained later include the excess online one H so then you'll have to pay income on that part is the general idea this limit is a 15,500 if you have only a simple plan so there's different types of retirement plans the 401k usually happened the largest benefit and then you have a different cap for the simple which is another kind of plan typically used by smaller businesses or 25,500 for section 403 B plans 403 B plans typically like a 401k plan but used for people that are our government employees if you qualify for the 15 year rule in publication 571 although designated Roth contributions are subject to this limit don't include the excess attributable to such contributions online one H why not because a Roth IRA is kind of the opposite in that you don't get a tax benefit when you put the money in but it's going to grow and when you take the money out you don't have to pay taxes when you take the money out of the Roth so it's kind of like the reverse of a normal IRA so they are already included as income in box one of form W2 because they're they're a Roth IRA they're already in income in the year that you put the money in a higher limit may may apply by the way when might you put money into a Roth versus a normal IRA usually if you're in your highest income earning years the logic is you put the money into a normal IRA getting the maximum benefit because you have the highest income at this point in time which means that you're going to be at the highest tax brackets and then when you retire you might be at lower income levels possibly because of good tax planning possibly because you're not living on the amount of money that you're earning you need less money to live on therefore taking less money out therefore resulting in lower tax brackets however you might be in a situation now where you have a lot of deductions like a home for example where the interest is deductible lower in your income a lot where as when you're retired you might hopefully have it paid off so you don't have that deduction maybe and you might guess that in retirement the taxes are going to be sky high because of all this all this entitlement programs are going to hit the wall at some point in which case the tax obligations are going to blow up and so maybe the taxes are going to go up when I retire in which case my strategy might be I pay the taxes now and then when I retire I try not I pull the money out and not have it subject to taxes because I think the higher tax rates are going to be at that time so that's just one idea on why you might do a Roth versus you want you might want money in both by the way because if you had money in both then you can take money out of each so that in retirement your your if you took a hundred thousand out of both a Roth and a normal then you're only going to be taxed on half of it right the fifty thousand which hopefully will not put you in a tax bracket that's too extreme you know as opposed to being in a hundred thousand tax break okay a higher limit may apply to participants in section five four seven B deferred compensation plans for the three years before retirement age contact your plan administrator for more information if you were age fifty or older at the end of two thousand twenty three your employer may have allowed an additional deferral catch up a contribution so in that case you might have a catch up ability to put more in of up to seven thousand five hundred three thousand five hundred for section four oh one K eleven and simple plans this additional deferral amount isn't subject to the overall limit on elective deferrals so disabled pension disability pensions showing on form ten ninety nine are if you haven't reached the minimum retirement age set by your employer but see insurance premiums for retired public safety officers in the instructions for lines five A and five B so if you take money out of the retirement plan then you will typically get this ten ninety nine are i think we're going to talk more about that out later if you take the money out early then you could be subject to penalties because the whole point of putting the money in was that you're going to put it you're going to restrict it until retirement so if you take it out sooner it might not just be subject to taxes which it will be if it's a normal retirement plan but also subject to penalty so disability pension received after you reach minimum retirement age and other payments showing on form ten ninety nine are other than payments from an IRA are reported on lines five A and five B payments from an IRA are reported on lines for a and for B corrective distributions from a retirement plan showing on form ten ninety nine are of excess elective deferrals and excess contributions plus earnings but don't include distributions from IRA on one H instead report distributions from an IRA on lines for a and for B okay line one I non-taxable combat pay election alright so if you elect to include your non-taxable combat pay in your earned income when figuring the I the earned income credit enter the amount on line one A so combat pay you're in the military would be the scenario you have combat pay which is going to be defined as combat pay now typically you might not have to pay taxes on combat pay which means you get the benefit of not having to include it in income income typically being bad so it would be good if you wouldn't have to include it in income but if you are calculating the earned income tax credit sometimes the earned income would actually result in a higher benefit a higher refund in essence because the earned income credit goes up so you might get a choice then with we don't want to we don't want to create a disincentive for the combat pay by not including it in income and therefore you get the choice of including it in income or not and so you'd have to run the scenario if you're in the low income situation to see if it would be beneficial to include the combat pay we'll talk more about that later when we get to the earned income tax credit okay were you a statutory employee so if you were a statutory employee the statutory employee box in box 13 your form W2 should be checked so statutory employees include full-time life insurance salespeople and certain agent or commission drivers certain traveling salespeople and certain home workers statutory employees report the amount shown on box one of form W2 on a schedule C along with any related business expenses so why is that important because now they might have you know the business expenses basically on a schedule C because normally the W2 employee doesn't report on a schedule C and usually isn't subject to the schedule C self-employment because they usually had it applied to them by their employee but you also typically don't get the benefits of the expenses typically because you're an employee so you could so you could have an exception here we might have the schedule C and possibly have business expenses you can dive into that in more detail with the instructions for statutory employees if you have that situation missing or incorrect form W2 your employer is required to provide or send form W2 to you no later than January 31st 2024 so for tax season kind of starts basically in February right because that's when at least everybody should have all their forms and by that time at least their W2 forms so if you don't receive it by early February use tax topic 154 to find out what to do even if you don't get a form W2 you must still report your earnings if you lose your W2 or it is incorrect ask your employer for a new one so here is our situation where you if you don't get it and then you can go to your employer and try to get it now if they still will not give it to you you're still responsible to file your taxes they have sent that W2 form to the government so once it gets processed you can actually go to the IRS if you need to possibly get the transcripts so you can get the W2 from that side but that's not the ideal way to go but it's there for you if you need to often that's an option or something you might have to do if you need to do your taxes for like three years ago or something and you haven't done them or someone else's taxes and you no longer have the capacity to go back to the employer now if the employer made an error on the W2 form then you want to report the correct number but if you report something different than the W2 the IRS is going to kick it back there's going to be problems almost for sure because they have a copy of the W2 so you want to then go to the employer and say hey you have to fix the W2 because you made an error and I can't file my taxes with the proper numbers because the IRS will kick it back and delay the refund and all that so typically you want to go to the employer for any corrections and any getting of the W2 first and then if you can't get to it and straighten it out there then then file the proper numbers and deal with the IRS side of things.