@Stevie123 wrote:
Thank you for you response! I wouldn’t want to make things more complex and potentially have the payroll make more mistakes if I was to try to fix it. I don’t mind paying taxes on those $200 which I never received. So, if I was to not do anything about it and leave it as it is( let’s say, the payroll will mail me a W2 including the income and taxes withheld from those two checks). Should there be any problems if I just file taxes with that W2? If for some reason the checks were never issued therefore no taxes were actually withheld from them and paid to the IRS but the W2 shows those taxes as withheld ( state, fica, and probably the employer’s portion of FICA) what would happen in that case? Will the IRS send me a letter later?
When the payroll company issues a W-2, copies go to the IRS and the social security administration, along with a form W-3 that is a cover page (more or less) that sums up all the deposits for a particular employer. The totals on the W-2s have to match the W-3, and they also have to match the form 941 that the payroll company files quarterly. Everyone uses software now so it is extremely unlikely that the payroll company would file W-2s and W-3s that did not match their quarterly 941s. So as far as the IRS and social security are concerned, what's on the W-2 is what you were actually paid and what's reported as withholdings in boxes 2, 4 and 6 is what was credited to your account. In the unlikely even there is a discrepancy, that's the responsibility of the payroll company, not you.
Trying to guess at the what is happening within the payroll company's accounts, it sounds like they received $100 gross from a client for a day on set, and they issued two payroll checks for $75 each, and they made two sets of payments to the IRS, social security, and the FTB, totaling about $50. If you do nothing, the payroll company comes out $50 ahead in the long run, although that might never be found, depending on how they run their bookkeeping. If you requested a replacement check, then the payroll company would be out $25 for the taxes withheld on the second check that you didn't actually work for. (And it might even be that the production company paid twice, so the payroll company is $150 ahead, and would still be ahead if you asked for one of the checks.) But that's not really your concern, unless you are weighing moral arguments to request that $75.
