New Mexico Unemployment Insurance Update

December 31st, 2006 Posted by Mark

New Mexico requires its employers to report quarterly on its unemployment insurance situation, as we have seen in other states in past entries in this blog. New Mexico, though, unlike some of the other states that we have looked at, is making a serious push to have their quarterly report system for unemployment insurance go completely digital and online.

The purpose of the new system will be to make all unemployment information standardized and easier to produce, report, double check, and store. It is no small project by any means, however. It is requiring the cooperation of no less than three departments in the state of New Mexico: the New Mexico Department of Labor, the New Mexico Tax and Revenue Department, and the Workers’ Comp Administration.

The system will meld together all of the efforts of those three departments so that employers can not only report their unemployment insurance info electronically, but workers’ comp and employee state tax withholding info as well.

When completed, the new info technology system will allow you and other New Mexico employers to report your unemployment info directly online, in a bulk file upload each quarter. This will give you hopefully an unprecedented chance to verify your information on former employees with the info that these employees haven given the New Mexico unemployment insurance system when they requested unemployment benefits.

Of course, the computer and the Internet will not solve all of your problems or difficulties in keeping track of all of your employee info. Sure, it may make it easier to communicate with the state authorities in New Mexico, but you still have to have all of this employee info to report in the first place. How better to make sure you can do this by keeping up to date and accurate employee personnel files, with all of the requisite human resource forms.

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New Mexico Unemployment Insurance Posters

August 25th, 2006 Posted by Emily

Each employing unit or business entity doing business in New Mexico must inform the Division within ten (10) days after beginning a business and request a status report, Form ES-802. The status report, a report to determine liability, must be filed with the Division within thirty (30) days from the commencement of the business even if the employing unit or business entity does not have employees performing services subject to coverage under the Act. You will also need to post the New Mexico Unemployment Insurance posters where they are clearly visible to your employees.

An employer who has not established liability may voluntarily elect unemployment coverage. If an employer elects unemployment coverage, an Election of Employer Liability form (ES-803) has to be filled out. If you choose to voluntarily elect coverage, you are also required to post New Mexico Unemployment Insurance posters.There has been a recent change to the reporting of UI information. For those employers currently filing quarterly reports on paper, the ES903A form has been revised to reflect combined reporting. The change requires employers to report total individual state withholding tax amounts for each employee and the individual’s workman’s compensation fee, in addition to reporting individual’s total gross wages and individual’s total excess wages. However, employers will not be able to pay the required taxes with a single payment. They will still have to complete the appropriate form for each tax program – ES903A, WC-1, and CRS-1 – and remit payment separately to Taxation and Revenue Department.

Beginning early in April 2006, the New Mexico Department of Labor, Workers’ Compensation Administration, and Taxation and Revenue Department implemented a consolidated filing process. This enables employers to file reports and submit required payments to each of the three agencies from a single Web site. Further information on this new process can be found on the Taxation and Revenue Department web site. You can continue to use your current Magnetic Media reporting but you will need to update the file format. The updated schema is available on Taxation and Revenue Department website.

The details of the most recent unemployment insurance labor laws can be found on the New Mexico Unemployment Insurance posters.

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