magiciansampras

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.600 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

I think that's true everywhere, no? I read up to 90 percent of families do it below board.

Often1

This has been standard in NY (and DC) for over 25 years. You "gross" up her wages to cover Federal, state & city + both employee and, of course, your share of Social Security and the entirety of Federal & state unemployment. As a rule of thumb, it's about 30% over her wages.

magiciansampras

^ Thanks for an actual answer.

Landing Gear

I don't know what you mean by "nanny laws" but I can assure you from personal knowledge that there is very serious enforcement of workers comp laws even if there is only one employee.

lombardo

Check out the Park Slope nanny survey, which is very helpful for this. Even if you don't live in Park Slope, it'll give a sense of what "normal" is.
On slide 50, you'll see that 36 percent of parents surveyed do NOT gross up, 33 percent do gross up fully and 14 percent pay some of the taxes. I have no idea what "other" means in this context, though.

http://www.parkslopeparents.com/docs...2011.FINAL.pdf

As an FYI, the majority of families (63 percent) pay completely off the books.

themicah

This is fascinating.

My guess is that a lot of the respondents didn't understand the technicalities of the question.

Note also that the 50th percentile hourly wage for a nanny on the books is a dollar higher than for one off the books, so in theory there's some gross-up built in there, too (although it's not a big enough spread to be a full gross up, my guess is that many on-the-books respondents are reporting take-home pay and not gross pay before taxes when it comes to hourly pay).

I think the more revealing number is that only 15% say they pay completely on the books.

Also note that more than half of those who reported paying part-on/part-off say they do so to keep their nanny eligible for social services like medicaid (the most common reason).

In other words, Landing Gear would be sending a heck of a lot of Park Slope parents to prison if given the chance.

magiciansampras

He better get busy!

Seriously, this is fascinating data. Wow. Very helpful. ^

dstan

And 13% "Prefer Not to Answer", so I would assume the true number is closer to 76%.


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This thread is obviously far afield from anything travel or tourism related. However, a number of other threads in the forum are also focused on assisting local members with various issues that are fairly specific to living in NYC. Accordingly, this thread will be allowed to remain here in the NYC Forum, provided that all members keep the discussion civil and free of personal exchanges.

The thread is yours to use or lose. @:-)

/Moderator

Landing Gear

But I am sure they are all drinking "fair trade," "shade grown," "organic" coffee, not taking their vegetables in plastic bags (even though that means they need to buy them for "poop scooping,") and encouraging the Food Co-op to boycott Israel.

In other words, typical Park Slope BS.

No, first, I want to get the perv or pervs who are molesting women in PS and send him or them to jail for a long term. Then, we can start with those who hire and exploit illegal aliens and fail to pay withholding taxes. After that, we'll just start with the civil penaties for failure to maintain workers comp. insurance.

Analise

Excellent set of priorities. ^

KPhill

Lombardo, thanks very much for this survey. Extremely helpful data.

Landing Gear is certainly right that there is very serious enforcement of workers comp laws - for the 15-37% of schmucks who may be at least partially in compliance. After we hired our nanny and put her "on the books", we didn't have workers comp set up for a bit less than a month. We got a nice letter from the NY State Workers Comp Board telling us that we owe a "civil fine" of $4000 for not having the workers comp policy in place for a few weeks ($2k for every 10 days).

After I tell this story to my friends who are not in compliance, they feel that much more justified in not complying. NY might do a bit better than 15% full compliance if they didn't assume that working mothers have an HR department and "licensed professional" labor and tax counsel on speed dial.

Perhaps Landing Gear and Analise should run for AG and see how long they stay in office after they try to throw 63-85% of Park Slope (for starters) nanny employers in prison.

magiciansampras

Yeah it is fairly confusing. We ended up hiring someone to take care of the paperwork partially out of fear of what you experienced!

Did you end up having to pay the $4k or were you able to get out of it?

KPhill

Good question. Trying to; haven't paid it yet. Funny thing is we hired a service to "take care of" the paperwork too!

magiciansampras

Lovely.

Landing Gear

Our moderator, dstan, has already requested that this thread not be personalized. While I have no interest in politics, I could be very tempted to throw 63-85% of the Park Slope population in prison, forget the nanny employers.

Anyone who ignores a penalty notice from the Workers Compensation Board is making a big mistake. The amount is not going to get smaller by itself. On the contrary, what could possibly have been negotiated downward will now increase and with collateral worse consequences. Many people think parking tickets are inconsequential as well but ignore just one and after a while, your car can be towed for it.

In case it's not already clear from this thread, your homeowner's insurance will not cover you for injuries sustained by a person in your employ whether or not she is on or off the books. Why play with fire?