If you are an employer, you don’t want to overlook the HIRE Act tax benefits. If you are looking to hire some new employees, college students are a great idea for a summer position. This is exactly what Congress is trying to encourage people to do, hire an employee who hasn’t worked more than 40 hours in the last 60 days before getting hired, and you may qualify for a temporary tax break. Passed in March, the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act would allow an employer with any qualified hire after February 3rd to skip paying the 6.2% Social Security taxes on the worker’s wages from March 19 through the rest of the year. This would save an employer nearly $2500 on $40,000 of pay.
A qualified hire would be someone who is unemployed this year (after February 3, 2010 and before Jan 1, 2011) and has not worked over 40 hours in the last 60 days.
The law is most useful to large corporations where they can use the HIRE provisions to save millions of dollars, but the law is also useful to small businesses. For example, these tax breaks work for businesses this summer who want to hire kids on summer break to help with paperwork or businesses that want to hire college students who haven’t worked elsewhere in the last 60 days and therefore, would be considered a “qualified employee.”