How To Fill Out Form W-4 Controller'S: Fill & Download for Free

You have the whole thing backwards. Which forms you file, whether correct or incorrect, does not determine whether you are an employee or an independent contractor. That is determined according to the facts of your “employment.” Then, depending on whether you are an employee or a contractor, you (and your “employer”) are required to follow certain procedures and complete certain forms. So, are you a contractor, or an employee?Submitting a W-9 does not make you an independent contractor. True, independent contractors will typically be required to provide W-9’s, because that’s usually the only way that the “employer” can get the information that it needs regarding the contractor’s social security number or EIN. But not all contractors provide W-9’s and not all W-9’s are provided by contractors.Nor does withholding tax make you an employee. There are plenty of reasons — both legitimate and erroneous — for taxes to be withheld even if you are not an employee. In fact, it would be pretty stupid for an employer to withhold income and employment taxes (and pay employment taxes) for a contractor. The fact that you were not asked for a W-4 (if true) indicates that the “employer” does, in fact, regard you as a contractor, rightly or wrongly. Of course, if you were asked for a W-4 and simply neglected to provide it, that’s a different story.One thing that could indicate your status is how you are treated for purposes of pay requirements. You say you are paid by the hour; are you paid overtime, or shift differential, or other premium pay? If so, then you must be an employee, because contractors are not subject to those requirements.As far as your question is concerned, it is absolutely not true that the employer “either has to have you fill out a W-4 or not withhold taxes.” If you are an employee, you are entitled to claim withholding allowances — which is what the W-4 does — and the employer is supposed to ask you to complete the form. But, whether you do so or not, the employer is legally obligated to withhold taxes from wages paid to employees. (If you do not provide a W-4, then the employer is required to withhold on the basis that you are single with no withholding allowances.)So, back to whether you are an employee in the first place, I do not know what you do, or why you think that you are an independent contractor, but I can tell you that it is not just a matter of deciding how you want to be treated. It’s a factual question of the amount of control that the “employer” has over your work. For example, can you set your own days and hours?; can you hire assistants?; do you work for other customers at the same time?; are you assigned “jobs” which you can then complete by your own methods, or are you assigned specific tasks?; are you furnished with an office, tools, etc, or do you provide your own? Can you be fired by the employer without him having any liability to you? Are there other workers who do the same thing as you? How are they classified? Those are just some indications that you may be a contractor; there are plenty more. And it is an all-or-nothing determination; you cannot be an employee for some purposes and a contractor for other purposes, with a few narrow exceptions (such as employees who also serve on a board of directors).

TL;DR = Your employer doesn’t “charge you taxes” - the government does. Whether you fill out any forms or not, employers will withhold your taxes and send them to the government because they don’t want to be fined (by the government) and/or go to jail.W-9 forms are what you fill out to verify your identification, or citizenship status, for your employers. They have nothing to do with payroll taxes other than being the primary tool to from which to glean the correct spelling of your name and your Social Security number.W-2 forms are issued by employers to employees for whom they paid the required payroll taxes to the government on their behalf. The W-2 also details the amount of a person’s pay was sent to the government to fund their Social Security and Medicare accounts. W-2 forms are necessary for people when filing their personal income taxes so they can calculate if they under or overpaid.W-4 forms are filled out by employees to assure that the appropriate amount of pay is being withheld (and transferred on their behalf) by their employers to the government. If you don’t fill out a W-4 then your employer withholds the standard default amount for a single individual. You can update your W-4 at any time with your employer and you may want to when the size of your household changes.Even if you aren’t an employee (like you get paid without taxes being withheld for you) and are issued a 1099-MISC form instead of a W-2, you’re STILL responsible for paying your taxes as you earn that money - in no greater than quarterly installments. If you go over three months without paying taxes when you’re making money - whether your employer is withholding it and paying it on your behalf or you just made the money and no one took any taxes out for you - you’ll be fined and charged interest on your late tax payments.Talk with a licensed tax preparer and they can help you better understand what it all means. Good luck and happy tax season!Now I’ll address the meta-question in the question: How can the government tax its citizen’s income?Well, that’s a big debate in America. Tax is the only way governments make money and they use that money to provide services for their constituency. Without funding, no federal or state or county program, or employee, would exist. But still, some people believe taxation is illegal, unjustified, and flat out wrong. They believe that free market forces should fund the military, the Coast Guard, Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Border Patrol, the FBI, CIA, DEA, FDA, USDA, USPS, the Federal Prison Complex, the National Park Service, the Interstate Highway System, air traffic control, and the Judiciary (just to name a few things). They even believe paying politicians for the work they do, like the President and Congress, is wrong.Others (luckily, most of us) appreciate paying taxes, even if they seem a bit steep at times. We’re happy to benefit from all the things our tax dollars buy us and we feel what we pay gives us back returns far greater than our investment. If you’re on the fence about this issue, consider how expensive health care is and how much you’re getting out of paying for it privately (out of your own paycheck). Same with your education or that of your children. Do you pay for private schools? Private colleges? Do you pay for private child care too? All expensive, right?Well what if we had to pay for private fire fighting? Or all mail had to be shipped via FedEx or UPS? Or if the cost of a plane ticket to anywhere doubled because we had to pay out-of-pocket for air traffic control? What about the military, border control and veterans? How much are you willing to pay out of every paycheck DIRECTLY to the department of defense AND veterans affairs? If we privatized the military, would we still be able to afford $30 billion dollar fighter jets? Who would pay to defend us?I bet people living paycheck to paycheck would be hard pressed to find extra money to pay for the military, when they’re already spending so much for teachers, schools, health care, local emergency response, food safety inspections, social workers, the criminal justice system, road repairs and construction, bridge inspection and maintenance, and natural disaster remediation (just to name a few things).Think about if all the national and local parks were privatized. Visiting one would cost as much or more than it does to go to Disneyland. Think about how much more food would cost if farmers weren’t subsidized and food wasn’t inspected for safety. Imagine how devastating a pandemic would be without the Center for Disease Control to monitor and mitigate illness outbreaks.We all take for granted the myriad of benefits we get from paying taxes. We may like to gripe and moan but taxes aren’t just for the public good, they’re for our own. (That rhymes!)

The Federal Withholding and California Withholding relate to Income tax, federal and California State, respectively.The other three are a straight percentage of your gross pay. You have no control over them.Federal FICA Med Hospital Ins /EE is Medicare/Medicaid tax, a percentage of your gross income. This basically pays, now, for the major medical expenses you are expected to incur after reaching age 65 and continue to spend until you die.The Federal blah-blah Disability and California blah blah Disability provide supplemental income if you become disabled and cannot work. Possibly, unemployment insurance is rolled in. Sorry, I am in New Jersey. The deal here is that if you are injured at work, you have insurance that will pay a fraction of your salary until you get better or reach retirement age. The more you earn, the greater the disability income. So, the more you earn, the more the insurance costs.The Federal Withholding and California Withholding are a “pay as you go” set aside of your income tax (Federal and California) due on April 15, next year. Wages are subject to withholding, a cut from every paycheck. entrepreneurs and investors have to pay estimated tax in installments over the year.If you get a refund, after filing your income tax (federal and California) next spring, the refund is going to be a portion of these amounts taken out of each paycheck over the year.When you were hired, your on-boarding packet from Human Resources included a Federal and California “W-4” form.The Federal and California withholding lines are entirely a function of tax rates and the information you submitted on the W-4’s.If this was your first job, you may have filled it out as if you were your parents’ dependent. If this is a real job, a step in a career, then no, you are probably not their dependent, as far as taxes go. That is a piece of information about your financial situation that gets captured in the W-4 and that goes into the calculation of your withholding. The withholding is a crude anticipation of the actual tax you will need to pay next year.If you have access to deductions and credits that will reduce your income tax, you can adjust a related number on the W-4 to lower the amount of withholding. You may want to do a practice filling out of the 2016 tax return based on your end of year income, to see an approximation of your tax bill next year.Not being a dependent of your parents is a big deal. So is being head of a household (with dependents), or owning a home with a mortgage and property taxes.Or also, education credits for the spring semester 2017.If these adjustments to your tax bill mean your withholding is way too high, you can amend the W-4 as per the instructions to reduce the withholding.