12 tax rate
Tax Rate (IMTQ-TAX-RATE(1))
This is the current quarter's tax rate for the account, a 5-digit numeric field located at positions 728 - 732. The units are thousandths of a percent. If the firm's tax rate is 3¼%, for example, this field should be set to 03250. If this is a new employer, the tax rate should be provided. If a new account's tax rate is not yet known (i.e., it has not yet received an experience rating), a default rate may be supplied. Many states will have default tax rates established by some level of industry-code aggregation, such as NAICS sectors.
If the rate is not available directly from Tax File data, but the taxable wages and contributions are known values, then the tax rate can also be computed by dividing the contributions by the taxable wages (when they are both positive values), then multiplying by 100,000. When at least one of these fields is either missing or zero, the computation cannot be made. As a last resort, a state default tax rate may be used. If no value is supplied (i.e., the tax rate is left as low-values), the system interface program will set it to zero.
For many States, the tax rate will generally remain the same until the beginning of a new year. However, some States can experience more frequent tax rate changes. It may often be safest to supply the tax rate on every quarterly extract. The rate for the new calendar year should always be used, regardless of what is supplied in the other quarters. When the tax rate is known to be unchanged, it can be left as low-values.
Note: One of the most common errors in early IMT files was to shift the digits of the tax rate to represent a whole percent value (such as '00005' for 5%). Please double-check this field to make sure it represents the proper units.
Tax rates are expected to match between master accounts and their worksite records. If the worksite tax rate is left as low-values, or if it is set to a different value than that of its parent, it will be defaulted to match the rate of the master by the system interface program and the micro edits program. It may be helpful to process worksites with low-values in the tax rate, since it is often more difficult to obtain information for worksite records.
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