New-hire reporting is a federal mandate that every employer is bound by but few know much about. The agency that receives the report is a state office — most states call it the State Directory of New Hires — and the deadline window is short.
What gets reported
A new-hire report goes to the state where the new employee will work. It contains the employee's name, address, and Social Security number; the employer's name, address, and federal EIN; and the hire date. Some states require additional fields — state of hire, occupational title, expected income — and we include those where the state requires them.
Federal mandate, state administration
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 is the federal law that created the requirement. Each state administers its own new-hire registry, with its own submission deadline (most are within 20 days; some are shorter), its own electronic format, and its own designated state agency that receives the file.
When an employer has employees in more than one state, the multi-state employer rule lets the employer pick one state to report all new hires to instead of reporting state by state. The choice has to be registered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and applies to electronic filers only.
How Payrollix handles it
Adding an employee in Payrollix and setting their hire date surfaces that employee in the pending list on the New Hire Reporting page for their work state. The required data — name, address, SSN, hire date, and the employer information — is pulled from the employee and client records, so you don't re-key it. To generate the report, open the New Hire Reporting page and click Create Report (or Create All Reports to generate the whole pending batch at once); to file it, click Transmit to State. Where Payrollix is registered as a reporter with the state's registry, transmitting sends the submission directly; in states where direct submission is not yet wired, the created report stays on the client record and we coordinate the submission through the appropriate channel within the deadline window.
If a report was created with the wrong work state, delete it — the Delete action is available on the report's row while it is still in draft or created status — and re-create it with the correct state. You do not need to track which reports went where — each report's status and acknowledgment are shown on its row in the New Hire Reporting table.