TWS automatically computes your Unemployment Insurance (UI) Tax at the rate assigned to your account for the filing period being reported.. If you filed reports for all prior liable quarters in the same calendar year via TWS, the system automatically computes your Excess Wages accurately. (Excess Wages are wages in excess of the taxable wage amount, which is the first $8,000 ($7,000 before January 1, 2023) paid to each employee each calendar year.) If you did not file such prior quarters via TWS, the system automatically “knows” this and prompts you to provide the Excess Wages amount yourself.
The first time you use TWS to report wages you paid, you must enter all the required employee information (Social Security Number, First/Last Name and Total Wages Paid in the quarter) for each employee. You may manually key this information or upload your own file.
When filing subsequent quarters you may import employee data from the most recent quarter for which you previously filed employee data via TWS, or you may manually key your employees’ information again. You may also upload your own file when filing any quarter. Wages filed via TWS are stored by Social Security Number (SSN); Prior Wages from earlier quarters in the same calendar year that were filed via TWS display on matching employee records when Excess Wages are computed. Excess Wages are automatically computed by TWS for each SSN record found, based on Prior Wages and the Quarter Wages keyed. As mentioned above, if you did not file reports for all prior liable quarters in the same calendar year via TWS, the system will prompt you to provide the Excess Wage amounts yourself.
Have your reporting and/or payment information prepared before you login and follow the step-by-step instructions to input your data and complete your transactions. To help you understand the entry fields on most of the screens, small “tooltips” will display as the mouse pointer hovers over the field. If the information disappears before you have a chance to finish reading it, move the mouse away from the field and then return to it. The message should re-display within a second. A few screens feature a “Help” button; clicking the button will open a window that displays information about that screen.
When you complete the online report filing process for any quarter for which you owe money, you will be given the choice of selecting either “Electronic Payment” or “Paper Check.” Select “Electronic Payment” to make an immediate online payment; select “Paper Check” to generate a printable payment voucher to mail along with your payment by check.
You will receive immediate confirmation when your report has been filed successfully or electronic payment has been accepted. Transactions are recorded in the TWS database immediately when “saved” or “filed.” Once they are "filed" they are transmitted to the UI Tax mainframe computer system. All reports and payments are date/time stamped based on date of last access to ensure that they are correctly processed as timely or untimely. Saved reports (“saved” on TWS but not yet “filed”) are maintained on the system for at least 30 days.
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When filing a quarterly Tax and Wage Report online, you may manually key your employee and wage data or upload it in your own data file. For a successful upload, the file must be in a "comma-delimited format." This means that all data elements on each line must be separated from each other by a comma. The file must also have a .txt (text) or .csv (comma-separated value) extension (for example, wagereport.txt or wagereport.csv).
Both of these file types can be created directly from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. If your accounting software is other than Microsoft Excel (e.g., Peachtree or QuickBooks), but will create a .csv or .txt file, that is also acceptable. Another possibility is to "export" or "copy and paste" employee and wage data to Excel and use that to create a .csv or .txt file. If none of these options will work with your software, you will not be able to utilize the upload feature. You may still use the online Tax and Wage System to file your quarterly wage report, but all employee and wage information would have to be entered manually. Manually entering a large number of employees is time-consuming; however, once all the employee and wage data is entered into the Tax and Wage System, the names and Social Security Numbers will be retained. It will not be necessary to re-key this data when filing subsequent reports. Visit our Employee and Wage File Upload Instructions page for more detailed information.
When you are on the Wage Report (UC-018) page select “Browse” to find and attach your file and then click the “Upload From File” button.