Office Management

If you have employees away on extended military deployments or who will train for two weeks this summer as members of the National Guard or Reserve, you face tricky pay problems. Here’s what Payroll needs to know.

Not ­getting your tax notices forwarded to your new address can be a deadly oversight. To separate out notifications from individuals and businesses, the IRS has created new Form 8822-B.

Start each day with a prioritized to-do list, dividing it into A-B-C tasks ... Ditch the half-truths, even the little white lies you tell to make someone feel better ... Earn respect of senior management by showing the ROI for whatever you’re proposing.

Payroll procedures for handling bonuses are affected by the FLSA. While such bonuses can increase morale, provide incentive to work harder, and entice strong applicants to join a company, improper treatment of employee bonuses can lead to FLSA violations. 

Most employees go after records or attack your record-keeping practices when they initiate lawsuits.  Most lawsuits in this area center on poor references by managers, the collection of inappropriate records, or the release of sensitive information to an unauthorized person.

You won't find many people who love meetings. That might be because attendees often feel like meetings are a waste of time. Turn your meeting minutes into an action plan.

Nowadays, IRS auditors ask for your electronic accounting records. But software files often contain data beyond the audit years, and software programs routinely create metadata for every data file created. So how do you keep the IRS from snooping around the personal and confidential business informations contained in those files?

Opening your email inbox to find a message criticizing your work is bad enough. But it’s even worse when you notice that your boss was cc’d on the message. An administrative professional re­­cently encountered this situation and wrote about it on our online forum.

The Fair Labor Standards Act doesn’t require you to provide employees with meal breaks. It does require you to pay employees whose meal breaks last for fewer than 30 minutes and those who work through their meal breaks. However, 40 states do have laws covering meal and rest breaks. This chart summarizes those laws.

$3,400: That’s how much the tax gap—the difference between what’s owed and what’s paid—costs every single taxpayer in extra taxes. And the figure is only growing. Proposals to close the tax gap were raised at a recent congressional hearing.