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Form W-2, in plain English.
Form W-2, the Wage and Tax Statement, is the annual form a US employer issues to every employee reporting gross wages, federal and state income tax withheld, and Social Security and Medicare withholding for the calendar year. Employees receive it by January 31. Copy A goes to the Social Security Administration, not the IRS. Workzoom generates W-2 data from the same employee record that ran the payroll, and your team files it.
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Sources
How Form W-2 works.
A W-2 is a summary of what already happened, not a new calculation. Every figure on it traces back to individual pay runs across the year, which is why the form is only ever as accurate as the payroll history behind it. Box 1 reports federal taxable wages, which is not the same number as gross pay once pre-tax deductions come out. Boxes 3 and 5 report Social Security and Medicare wages separately, because those two programs use different ceilings. Workzoom builds the W-2 from the single employee record, so a mid-year address change, a name correction, or a retroactive adjustment is already reflected rather than reconciled by hand in January.
Where Form W-2 goes wrong.
- The common failure is treating January as the moment to fix the year.
- Wrong Social Security numbers, stale addresses, and unrecorded taxable benefits all surface at W-2 time, and correcting one after filing means a W-2c.
- The second trap is assuming Box 1 should match gross pay. It rarely does, and finance teams lose hours reconciling a difference that is working as designed.
- 2000 Running payroll since Workzoom has run Canadian payroll for 26+ years.
- Canadian hosting on AWS available
- Trusted in production County of Renfrew, Silvera for Seniors, and Cable Bahamas. Built for 50 to 5,000 employees.
In the product
How Form W-2 runs on Workzoom.
Form W-2 is part of the Workzoom Payroll Suite. Workzoom runs HR, workforce, and talent on a single employee record across ten countries: Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and the United Kingdom. Full gross-to-net payroll runs live in Canada, the United States, and the Bahamas. Pricing starts at $4 per employee per suite per month.
Questions about Form W-2
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Workzoom works with organizations of 50 or more employees. See our minimums.