MONTPELIER — After a computerized sorting snafu sent the wrong 1099 tax forms to thousands of Vermonters earlier this year, the Vermont Department of Labor is once again facing another error that appears to have sent erroneous invoices to Vermont businesses for underfunding unemployment accounts in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Middlebury-based Addison Independent publisher Angelo Lynn received such an invoice Friday morning and, after a half hour of research and a few calls between the company’s bookkeeper and payroll service, discovered that the invoice was another error made by the Vermont Department of Labor.
PayData services of Burlington advised the Addison Independent, and many of its other clients, not to pay the invoice and to await further instructions and clarifications from their service as well as the Department of Labor. “The person we talked to at PayData said they had received hundreds of phone calls with similar complaints starting this Thursday and Friday,” Lynn said.
No official word has yet come from the Vermont Department of Labor as of early Friday, Lynn said, but late Friday afternoon PayData sent out a notice to its customers saying they had confirmed that the Vermont Department of Labor “sent the notices out in error” and to “disregard” the invoice.
In early February, the Department of Labor recalled tax documents it mailed out to all 2020 Vermont recipients of Unemployment Insurance benefits due to mix-ups in names, personal data and mailing addresses of up to 180,000 residents.
Many unemployment insurance (UI) recipients received in the mail the names and Social Security numbers of other UI recipients on 1099G forms used to report income to the IRS and Vermont Department of Taxes.