hired a new nanny -- now ISO HELP registering as a household employer in DC & MD?

[Anonymous]

Good morning! We've just hired a new nanny for our infant. We live in DC and she lives in MD, and we're having difficulty navigating those two jurisdictions' sites as we try to register for payroll purposes.

I understand that we need three registrations in order to be a household employer:

1. Federal Employee Identification Number (already done through IRS -- very straightforward and easy, and we did this quickly).
2. identification number in DC (where we live), to register for our employee's unemployment insurance.
3. identification number in MD (where she lives), to register for our employee's income taxes.

I imagine many of you have already navigated this, but we're finding both the DC and MD sites difficult to figure out. For example, DC tells me I can't have zero DC-resident employees (even though ours is not a DC resident), and so it won't let me continue. And in MD, I can only seem to find the unemployment insurance application, even though as I understand it we don't need UI in that jurisdiction, only DC. I'm not sure where to go to register as an employer of a MD resident.

Can any kind soul help us solve this puzzle? It's the one thing standing in the way of us being able to finish our payroll setup and pay our wonderful new nanny. Thank you!

[Anonymous]

You need to pay DC unemployment, have a DC workers comp policy, and MD income taxes.

Highly recommend using a tax and payroll service that wraps a workers comp policy into their services. 1000% work it to have you covered professionally on all fronts.

[Anonymous]

Get a payroll service like Homepay from care.com. They do all this for you.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for these responses. We are using SurePayroll, and also got workers comp insurance through its parent company, Paychex.

I registered through DOES for the DC unemployment portion.

I'm trying now to register through MD for the income taxes portion, but the registration doesn't appear to get approved immediately.

Has anyone else had this experience and knows when I can expect to have the appropriate tax ID numbers in hand for both DC and MD? Thank you!

[Anonymous]

I am currently in literally this exact situation and am running into exactly the same problem - OP how did you solve this?

[Anonymous]

I tried doing all this myself for a year and a half and paid almost $30 for Intuit to manage the payroll side of (I did it, but they calculated). Out of frustration I engaged Poppins Payroll and for barely a few dollars more they DID EVERYTHING including doing all of the filings you are talking about, spitting out the tax forms, filing the needed forms, etc. So, so worth every penny.

[Anonymous]

Thank you - I was trying to decide which service to use and Poppins seems like a winner!

[Anonymous]

Honestly, I would recommend anyone in this situation circle up immediately with homework solutions. They walk you through *everything* to start, and then it's a breeze once it's up and running.

[Anonymous]

Get a payroll service.

[Anonymous]

I recommend Poppins. They’re great.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I recommend Poppins. They’re great.

+1

Poppins payroll has been great for us, and inexpensive.