NE New Hire Report

Overview

Nebraska requires employers to report newly hired employees who meet the following criteria:

• New employees: Employers must report all employees who reside or work in the State of Nebraska to whom the employer anticipates paying earnings. Employees should be reported even if they work only one day and are terminated (prior to the employer fulfilling the new hire reporting requirement).

• Re-hires or Re-called employees: Employers must report re-hires, or employees who return to work after being laid off, furloughed, separated, granted a leave without pay, or terminated from employment within 20 days of re-hire. Termination of employment does not include temporary separations from employment, such as unpaid medical leave, an unpaid leave of absence, a temporary lay-off of less than 60 days in length, or an absence for disability or maternity.

• Temporary employees: Temporary agencies are responsible for reporting any employee who they hire to report for an assignment. Employees need to be reported only once; they do not need to be re-reported each time they report to a new client. They do need to be reported as a re-hire if the worker has a break in service or gap in wages from your company.

• Independent Contractors: New Hire enforcement allows for reporting independent contractors under the New Hire Act. This reporting method will help identify individuals who have taken new employment and have child support obligations.

This reporting must be done within 20 days after the employee is hired or re-hired. Employers who submit reports magnetically or electronically shall submit the reports by two monthly transmissions if necessary, which are not less than 12 days or more than 16 days apart.

There are options to create a Hard Copy report (which includes options to send the report to the screen, a text file, or an Excel file) and to produce an Electronic File. A hard copy report must be produced first, without error, before the electronic file may be created; this is to ensure that the electronic file does not contain any data that did not pass validation checks within the report. Any validation errors are written to a separate error log file.

The electronic file may be sent to the state and should be named as follows: the first 4 characters of the company name (NEBR in this case) followed by the 2-character month and 2-character day when the report was created.
The file may be transmitted via web transfer at the site

www.NE-newhire.com, or via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

Setup

Human Resources Profile

The Nebraska New Hire Report uses several pieces of employer information from the Human Resources Profile, found under System Administration->All->Profiles -> Human Resources Profile, on the Federal/State Reporting tab.

The fields from this screen that are used on the Nebraska New Hire Report are Employer Fed Tax ID, Employer Name, Employer Address, City, State, and Zip.

W2 Parameters

The Nebraska New Hire Report uses several pieces of employer information from W2 setup, found under Human Resources -> Periodic Routines-> Year End -> W2 processing. 

Select Set Up W2 Parameters.

The fields from this screen that are used on the Nebraska New Hire Report are Contact Name and Phone.

Employee Information

Employee information is taken from the information found under Human Resources-> Entry & Processing-> Employee-> Employee Information.

The fields required for the Nebraska New Hire Report are Social Security, First Name, Last Name (found at the top of the screen), and Hire Date, Address, City, State, and Zip (found on the Employment tab). Birth Date is not required, but is included if present.

Contractor Information

Contractor information is taken from two sources:

• Nebraska Contractor New Hire Information

• Vendor Information

Nebraska Contractor New Hire Information

Select Fund Accounting-> Reference Tables-> Purchasing-> Vendor List; Click Find, select your vendor, select Defined Windows, and then select the row for Page 32001, Nebraska Contractor New Hire Information.

The fields required for the Nebraska New Hire Report are Contractor, Social Security, First Name, Last Name and Hire Date. Middle Name, Birth Date, and State of Hire are not required but are included if present.

The fields in this user-defined window are defined as follows:

• Contractor? – Required field. Valid values are 'Y' or 'N'. 'Y' indicates the vendor is considered a contractor for New Hire reporting purposes.

• Social Security Number – character field, entry should include hyphens. No validation.

• Last Name – character field, no validation.

• First Name – character field, no validation.

• Middle Name – character field, no validation.

• Birth Date – date field, correct date format is validated.

• Hire Date – date field, correct date format is validated.

• State of Hire – character field, should be 2-character state abbreviation. No validation.

The window definition is created by the install file Ene.4gl, which creates rows in the table vnd_def.

Vendor Information

Select Fund Accounting -> Reference Tables-> Fund Accounting-> Vendor List, on the Address Tab, the following fields from the Purchasing Address (left panel) are used if present; otherwise, the fields from the Accounts Payable address (left panel) are used.

Address 1, City, State, and Zip are required. Address 2 is included if present.

Reports

The Nebraska New Hire Report can be found under Human Resources -> State-> NE New Hire Report

The user will be required to choose either the Hard Copy or Electronic File report. However, the Hard Copy report must be run first, and the output verified, before the Electronic File option can be run.

The New Hire Report Date must be entered. Any employee or contractor whose Hire Date is later than or equal to the entered Hire Date will be included in the report.

The report gathers all the necessary personnel information for any included employees, followed by information for vendors who are designated as contractors. On the report, rows for employees come first, followed by rows for contractors.

The Hard Copy option generates a report that shows what information will be reported to the state. If the program finds errors, the user is advised to correct the errors and rerun the hard copy report.

The Electronic File option is only available after running the Hard Copy option and receiving no validation errors. If the user changes the Hire Date, or leaves the New Hire Report screen and returns to it, the Hard Copy option will have to be rerun in order to enable the Electronic File option.

Hard Copy Option

When running the Hard Copy option, if the user has permissions to see social security numbers, a message is displayed.

If the user answers "Yes" full social security numbers will display in the report; if the user answers "No", the first 5 digits will be masked with X's.

Next, the user is given the following output options:

"Screen" is the default option, and it will output the report to the user's screen as a PDF file. From here the report may be printed or saved.

Selecting "File" will enable the File Name edit box. Here the user may change the name and location of the output file. The completed report will be written to this file in text format.

Selecting "Excel" will enable the Data Option drop-down. The default value is "No Totals". If the user selects the option "All Information" a total count of records will be included in the output file. The output will be sent to an Excel spreadsheet, which will open on the user's display. The checkbox for "Run in the Background" is also enabled for Excel; this option creates the excel file in the report directory as a background process, without displaying the results.

If any data validation errors are discovered during processing, an error log file will be written to the report directory, and an error message is displayed.

Electronic File Option

When running the Electronic File option, the output file name and location may be changed. Note, however, that the default file name (NEBR + 2-digit day + 2-digit month) is the format required by Nebraska for submission.

No other options may be changed on this screen.

After the Electronic File option completes, a message is displayed.

Error messages

1. Employer error message:

   • Contact name and phone number not entered on the W2 screen
     (Note: phone number is stored with dashes, but will be sent to the electronic file without dashes, per Nebraska specification)

2. Employee error messages:

   • employee number Employee SSN must be in format 999-99-9999

   • employee number Employee last name must be specified

   • employee number Employee first name must be specified

   • employee number Employee address must be specified

   • employee number Employee city must be specified

   • employee number Employee state must be specified

   • employee number Employee ZIP code must be at least 5 digits

   • employee number Employee hire date must be specified

3. Contractor error messages:

   • vendor number Contractor SSN must be in format 999-99-9999

   • vendor number Contractor last name must be specified

   • vendor number Contractor first name must be specified

   • vendor number Contractor hire date must be specified

   • vendor number Contractor address must be specified

   • vendor number Contractor city must be specified

   • vendor number Valid contractor state must be specified

   • vendor number Contractor hire state, if specified, must be valid

   • vendor number Contractor ZIP must be at least 5 digits

4. Form entry error messages:

   • File name prefix must be 4 characters long

   • File name prefix may not contain any spaces

   • Must enter hire date

   • First run the hard copy report and verify the new hire information

Report And File Layouts

Electronic File:

There are three record types in the electronic file. Definitions below are from the Nebraska State Directory of New Hires Electronic Reporting Specifications at http://newhire-reporting.com/NE-Newhire/media.aspx

Header Record

Employer Record

New Hire Record