Families First Coronavirus Response Act: Wages Paid as a Result of the EPSLA and EFMLEA Not Subject to the Employer Portion of Social Security Taxes

 

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (H.R. 6201) was signed into law on March 18, 2020. This law responds to the COVID-19 outbreak by providing paid sick leave, tax credits, and free COVID-19 testing; expanding food assistance and unemployment benefits; and increasing Medicaid funding. See https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6201/text for full details.

 

Part of this law is the creation of the Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act (EPSLA) for coronavirus-related needs and the Emergency Family and Medical Leave Expansion Act (EFMLEA) that includes a paid leave component for employees caring for children whose schools or child care facilities were closed because of the outbreak.

 

Any wages paid as a result of the EPSLA and EFMLEA are not subject to the employer portion of Social Security taxes (stated in Section 7005, Special Rule Related to Tax on Employers, of the law). 

 

To address this requirement, the following updates have been made to the following applications and reports in Vantagepoint: 

• Payroll Processing: A new check box, Suppress Employer FICA for this run, has been added to the General tab of this screen. If you select this check box, Vantagepoint will not calculate the employer Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) amount for any employee(s) selected in the respective run. This check box is enabled only when Run Type is set to Regular or Adjustments and Process Type is set to Manual Select.

• Payroll Journal: If applicable, “(Employer FICA Suppressed)” is appended to the value in the Run Type field on the header of this report to indicate if the Suppress Employer FICA for this run check box is selected for the respective Regular or Adjustments payroll run. This is applicable for both the draft and final forms of the report.

• Form 941 Worksheet: The FICA portion of the Summary section has been updated to break out the employee calculations from the employer calculations. This now looks similar to the following:

FICA:

Employee Wages subject to Hospital Insurance (HI)	--------
Employee Tax ($XXXXX @ 1.45%)	--------
Employee Tax for those employee’s reaching
the 200K threshold ($XXXXX @ 2.9%)	--------
Employee Wages subject to Old-Age, Survivors
and Disability Insurance (OASDI)	--------
Employee Tax ($XXXXX @ 6.2%)	--------
Employer Wages subject to Hospital Insurance (HI)	--------
Employer Tax ($XXXXX @ 1.45%)	--------
Employer Wages subject to Old-Age, Survivors
and Disability Insurance (OASDI)	--------
Employer Tax ($XXXXX @ 6.2%)	--------

Include All Organization Levels and Search Operators in Employee Search

When you perform an Employee search from the Employees hub, Reporting application, or Employee Base dashparts, you can now access all 5 levels of the organization structure: Company, Discipline, Region, Local, and Team. You can also access all operators and their associated values for each of the 5 organization levels.

If your database has an employee field that contains the same description as the organization level (for example, Location), then only the first field is displayed in the list of search results.

Defect 1275334: This issue occurred when you set the Use Files to Group Transactions option to No in Settings » Accounting » Transactions and then ran Revenue Generation for all projects with the Post transaction immediately after calculation check box cleared. When you selected Transaction Center » Transaction Entry » Journal Entries, no records were displayed in the grid for posting.

Defect 1277448: Revenue Generation calculations that contained a planning component were incorrect at the project level when you selected Enable Overall Revenue Limit on the Accounting tab of the Projects form in Hubs » Projects » Project.

Defect 1227667: When you scheduled a batch of invoices to process and you selected only some of the projects from a saved search to process, all the projects from the original saved search were processed.

Defect 1236778: When you voided an invoice on the Invoice History tab in Interactive Billing and you created a new transaction file for the void, you received the following error: "Conversion from string to date is not valid." The billing transactions were added back to the Interactive Billing form and the invoice was removed from the Invoice History tab, but the voided transaction file was not created. This occurred if the invoice's project had invoice approvals enabled and had prior invoices.

Defect 1270702: This issue occurred when you have fee-based billing terms defined at WBS level 1 for a project, but no billing terms defined at lower levels of the WBS. In Interactive Billing, when you opened WBS level 2 or 3 and selected the Fees tab, you should have received the following message: "Fee billing terms are not defined."

Defect 1272951: In Interactive Billing, you received the following error message when you created an invoice, accepted it, and tried to create a new invoice file for it on the Invoice File Selection dialog box: "You do not have rights to add records." This occurred when you had rights to access Interactive Billing and create invoices.

Defect 1276158: This issue applies if you have Require Transaction Dates to be Within the Active Accounting Period set to Yes in Settings » Accounting » Transactions. In Interactive Billing, you were able to select an invoice transaction file created in a prior period when you accepted an invoice in the active period.

Defect 1279907: When you changed invoice approvers for a project, the changes did not take effect unless you deleted the billing terms and set them up again.

Defect 1270142: Even when the values in the Calculated Balance and Closing Balance fields were the same, you received the error message: "Bank reconciliation does not tie out."

Defect 1261923: When you tried to edit an existing activity, even if all required fields on the Overview tab were filled in, you received this error message: "Please review values on the Overview tab."

Defect 1276003: If a user's security role is set up with record access to contact records that is based on the value of a user-defined field, that user received a server error when they tried to add contacts to the grid on the Team tab of the Projects form, when they tried to view contact information in List View in the Contacts hub, and when they searched for contacts.

Defect 1279275: On the Overview tab of the Employees form, when you selected the Firm check box, the Firm field was missing from the Summary pane on the form and you received a message: "Please resolve the errors indicated below." Because the field was missing, there was no indication of what you needed to resolve.

Defect 1251204: In the Firm Summary Pane of the Firms form, the value in the Number field was removed when you added any address information in the Addresses grid of the Overview tab. This occurred if:

• Autonumbering was enabled for the Firms hub (Settings » Workflow » Numbering).

• The Allow Override of Auto Numbering check box was selected for the Firms hub on the Numbering form (Settings » Workflow » Numbering).

• Your role (or the role of the user that added the address) had no access rights to edit the firm number on the Roles form (Settings » Security » Roles).

Defect 1277342: When you scrolled through marketing campaign records, Vantagepoint displayed incorrect values in the Actual Revenue and Potential Revenue fields for each record.

Defect 1267278: When you set the Method option to Create Project From Template on the Function Configuration dialog box for a workflow with a Function action type, the workflow created new project records with an empty Charge Type. This occurred even if the charge type was correctly configured in the selected project template.

Defect 1272826: When you made any change to a project, you received the error message: "Please provide a Contract Start for table Projects". This occurred when you upgraded from older versions of Vantagepoint and you worked on migrated projects that had old Screen Designer information, when system milestones were individual date fields on the Dates & Costs tab. This caused discrepancies because the milestones now display as rows in the Milestones grid.

Defect 1274036: When you attempted to enter values in the Contract Details grid on the Contract tab, the Project WBS levels collapsed after each entry and you had to continuously re-expand the levels in order to enter the values.

Defect 1262904: When you displayed an invoice on the Draft Invoice Approvals form in the Projects hub, the dates in the Bill Through Date, Bill Through Period, and Period Start/End Date fields on the Billing Session Options dialog box did not match the dates previously set using the Billing Session Options dialog box in Interactive Billing when you submitted the invoice.

Defect 1280479: When you opened a submitted invoice in Draft Invoice Approvals, the Prior Billed-To-Date field in the Draft Invoice Details grid did not display any values when previous invoices existed.

Defect 1230685: You could preview an intercompany billing invoice from the Invoices on File tab of the Intercompany Billing form in the desktop application, but you received an error if you tried to preview the same invoice from the Invoices form in the Projects hub in the browser application.

Defect 828334: If your security role had limited rights to rate tables, when you selected Other Actions » Plan Settings in Hubs » Projects » Plan, you received the following error message: "The multi-part identifier "CFGBillingRateTableCode.Code" or "RateTable.Tablename" etc. could not be bound."

Defect 1218992: When the Charge Type field on the Projects form was locked for your role (as configured in Screen Designer), and you tried to create a linked promotional project, a regular project was created instead.

Defect 1277471: When you tried to replace the client in the regular project’s Primary Client field with another client from the list for a linked promotional project, you received an error message: "Cannot insert duplicate key row in object. The statement has been terminated."

Defect 1279294: When you used the Copy option for a row in the grid on the Edit Project Structure form to copy a work breakdown structure (WBS) element, you received the following error when you clicked Save: "These columns don't currently have unique values." This error only occurred if the following were both true:

• The WBS element that you copied had duplicate milestones.

• At least one Projects area workflow was set up for the PRMilestone table with Insert/Associate selected as the workflow type.

Defect 1267062: When you saved a delegate approver in the Delegate Approvals To field in My Preferences, Vantagepoint did not display the saved value when you refreshed the browser or when you logged back in.

Defect 1263772: If you were an attendee assigned to an All Day activity, you were unable to view the activity's name and details.

Defect 1251642: On the Favorite Reports tab of the Reporting form, when you deleted a favorite report that was currently used in a dashboard, you received an error message indicating that the favorite report was used in a dashboard, but the message did not indicate which dashboard.

Defect 1266304: When you used the Favorites tab to generate a favorite report with the Executive report type, you received the message: "Report is being generated..." and the report window stopped responding. This occurred if you used task or WBS3 search criteria to generate the Executive type favorite report.

Defect 1270056: Lookup-based, custom reports did not return the correct results, because the report path rather than the report name was used to retrieve the custom options. As a result, the custom Lookup options loaded incorrectly.

Defect 1278657: When you set the Employee Hire Date to Last/Next Month and used it as a search criterion, you received an error message when you tried to run the Employee List report.

Defect 1279203: When you added a user-defined column from the Employees hub to the Asset Item Export report, you received an error message when you tried to run the report. The user-defined Employees hub columns have been removed and user-defined columns from the Equipment hub have been added.

Defect 1280034: If, on the Options tab for the Project Earnings report, you selected a period range under Time Frame Options and then set the Find Activity in This Time Frame option to Period Range, Vantagepoint ignored the period range when you generated the report and used the current period instead.

Defect 1274015: When you added and applied a new project on the Custom Search dialog box, you received an error message: "Server was unable to process request."

Defect 1270678: This issue occurred if you selected the EngIish (International) language when you logged in to Vantagepoint. In the Outlook add-in, the project stage in the Vantagepoint Project History section showed the project stage code instead of the description.

Defect 1268874: If five levels of an organization structure were in use, you could not select the fifth level when using the New Employee Search dialog box to conduct an employee search.

Defect 1269391: The search results were incorrect when you used an advanced search with the following settings:

• You set the Project Level option for a search criterion to Phase level.

• You set the Display option to All Matches.

Defect 1266747: When you tried to add or copy multiple rows of expense categories and clicked Save, you received an error message: "Record already exists and cannot be added."

Defect 1280402: This issue applies if you have multiple companies in Vantagepoint. For the AR Aged report, when you opened the report options and clicked + Manage Grouping for the Grouping and Sorting grid on the Columns & Groups tab, Due from Company was missing in the grid on the Select Groupings dialog box.

Description: If you set Touch CRM to the Brazilian Portuguese language, the translation of the In Pursuit tab in Project was truncated and not capitalized. 

Defect 1267245: When you created a new voucher file and you entered a new voucher file name that exceeded 32 characters, you received an error message: "String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated."

Defect 1276818: When you posted timesheets, you received an error message: "Concurrency Violation: the UpdateCommand affected 0 of the expected (x) records."

In other areas of Vantagepoint, the posting status of the timesheets displayed inconsistently as Incomplete, Posted, or not posted at all. In Transaction Center » Posting Review, the affected posted timesheets were not visible in the posting logs.

Defect 1267022: When you created a new cash disbursement file or modified an existing record, you received the error message: "You do not have access." This occurred when you clicked Other Actions » Control Totals.

Defect 1266853: When you manually added a project information detail row to a Cash Receipt file and you entered a value in the Amount field, the Source Relief field did not update automatically. This resulted in incorrect transaction entry postings.

Defect 1228577: When you ran the process to update projects in Vantagepoint based on changes to their source opportunities in GovWin IQ, you received notifications that the update process failed in some cases.

Defect 1282107: When you used the Create Contracts from Fees utility in the desktop application (Utilities » Updates » Create Contracts from Fees) for a batch of projects, the utility created multiple random contracts in the projects.