PARENT'S RIGHTS NOW!

How does it make sense and help a company's bottom line to comply with such a reporting requirement? Simple: the reports are used primarily for tracking parents who owe back child support and for reducing fraud under various social programs, including unemployment benefits. Employers are a vital link in the effort to ensure payment of child support, not only through garnishment of wages, but also through the new hire reports. If your employees who are owed child support start receiving it because of someone else's new hire report, you will have a better, more focused employee. What you do can help other employers, and what they do in that regard will help you. New hire reporting also helps your company through reduction of benefit fraud. Part of the unemployment tax that every taxed employer has to pay comes from claim fraud that must be recouped somehow, and of course the "somehow" is by resorting to employers! Since a new employee's wages will not be reported to TWC for up to three or four months following their hire, the new hire report can help TWC detect UI benefit claim fraud three or four months earlier than it might normally be found. For more details, see the article titled "How Employers Can Help Reduce Claim Fraud" in the Post-Employment Problems section of this book. In addition, since the new hire reporting law absolutely requires employees to give you their social security numbers, it is one more tool to use in verifying SSNs (see the article in the next section of this book titled "Verification of Social Security Numbers"). If a cross-match turns up a problem with the SSN, you can then contact the Social Security Administration for assistance in verifying whether the number is valid. Finally, new hire reporting can help avoid the problem of employees engaging in "double-dipping" with other state or federal benefit programs, such as workers' compensation.