MOORESTOWN, NJ -- (Marketwire) -- 01/04/13 -- PayChoice announced its readiness to help its customers understand and comply with the new tax changes recently enacted by Congress, and signed into law by the President, known as the "American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012" or ATRA. For well over two decades, PayChoice has always been at the forefront of all tax law changes.

The highlights of the ATRA law include the following:

• For 2013, Social Security tax rates for employees have returned to 6.2%, up from 4.2%. The tax applies to the first $113,700 of wages.
• The tax rates reduced in 2001 and 2003 for individuals earning up to $400,000 and families earning up to $450,000 will go unchanged per the Act. However, for Income above those levels, the tax rates will increase from 35% to 39.6%.
• The marriage penalty relief, which is the expanded 15% for those filing jointly, has been extended permanently.
  

Effective 2013 there is also a planned increase of 0.9% for employees known as the "Additional Medicare Tax." This is part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and is not part of ATRA. However this additional tax will impact individuals earning over $200,000 and married joint filers earning over $250,000. So regardless of filing status, the current Medicare tax rate of 1.45% will increase to 2.35% on earnings exceeding $200,000. The employer portion of 1.45% for Medicare will remain. Employers are now mandated to withhold the "Additional Medicare Tax" on all workers whose wages are over $200,000 regardless whether they are single or married.

Robert Digby, CEO of PayChoice, stated, "Our internal tax experts and customer support have always been exceedingly diligent in monitoring all pending federal, state, and local tax changes and the impacts these changes have on payroll, benefits, and human resources. We make every effort to maintain our systems as well as educate our customers and staff in the implications of these tax law changes."

About PayChoice

For more than 20 years, PayChoice has helped small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) succeed by providing them a Fortune 500-style suite of payroll and HR services that frees the owner to focus on growing and managing their business.

The PayChoice suite of services includes payroll, tax filing, HR data management, time & attendance, workers' compensation and other employee management services and solutions. Because PayChoice delivers these services directly to SMBs through an intensely personal approach, our client satisfaction and retention are among the highest in the industry.

PayChoice is also the market leader in licensing payroll / HR software, and over 200 payroll / HR vendors nationally employ PayChoice's technology as the core of their service offering. All of PayChoice's applications are hosted in PayChoice's state-of-the-art private cloud infrastructure and delivered via a SaaS model. In total, PayChoice technology is used to meet the payroll and HR needs of over 150,000 businesses and nearly 2 million employees nationwide.

For more information, please visit www.paychoice.com or call 888.591.5151.