The IRS employs a lot of seriousness in employment taxes, which might come as a surprise to most people, with the reason being that most of it is actually the IRS’s cash held in trust. The takes a failure to pay employment taxes more seriously than even the failure to pay income tax. 

Caution should be exercised especially, when one is dealing with payroll taxes. This is because proving reasonable cause after a misstep is usually very difficult. The IRS rarely accepts excuses even in businesses, where the owners are assumed to have personal liability. The IRS can hold one responsible even if they are not aware that the IRS has not been paid by the business.

In a business, any person who is identified by the IRS as a “responsible person” can be pursued by the IRS for payroll taxes. The IRS has the right to pursue a 100 percent penalty against any person termed to be responsible. This penalty is applied on any business owner, officers or check signers regardless of whether they benefited from the diverted money. This means that persons with the responsibility of signing checks can be held liable by the IRS even if they are not the business’s owners and even when they are genuinely unaware of the nonpayment.

Small business owners therefore, have to be keen and make sure they pay their employees through a net check from which employment taxes are deducted from. The deducted taxes must be then get paid promptly to the IRS. The owners must also remember to complete employment tax returns quarterly.

The IRS provides an IRS Form W-2, which every business owner must present to every employee in the January of every year. One can engage the services of a payroll service to ensure they do not forget any details. This is because if one forgets any detail to an extent that the IRS considers to be serious, then the issue can become a criminal one. Many people have been jailed for failure to comply usually because of temptations where one decides to use the withheld money for an urgent or pressing need before paying it back only to forget or be caught out.

One should therefore, show interest in the progress of their payroll taxes payment and avoid temptations to escape payment or to spend the money with intentions of paying back later, as the lack of interest and temptation might just cause one to end up on the wrong side of prison bars for a crime considered to be very serious by the IRS.