Trump’s payroll tax deferral for census workers cost taxpayers : NPR

After former President Donald Trump signed a presidential memo in August 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau was directed to stop collecting payroll taxes from certain employees in the final months of last year. The bureau is now trying to get some former temporary workers to pay what they owe.

Susan Walsh/AP

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Susan Walsh/AP

After former President Donald Trump signed a presidential memo in August 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau was directed to stop collecting payroll taxes from certain employees in the final months of last year. The bureau is now trying to get some former temporary workers to pay what they owe.

Susan Walsh/AP

The U.S. Census Bureau has been stuck with a $7 million accounting mess after former President Donald Trump’s administration ordered the federal agency to pause payroll taxes last year for certain employees, including many temporary 2020 census workers, NPR has learned.

The bureau was one of many federal agencies directed to stop collecting some employees’ share of a payroll tax that helps fund the Social Security system in the final months of 2020. The deferral applied to workers earning less than $4,000 before taxes each pay period.

“In total, $7,078,909 in payroll tax collections were deferred for 177,964 temporary employees,” the bureau confirmed to NPR in a statement.

Trump touted the push as a way to get “bigger paychecks for working families” during the coronavirus pandemic. The former administration had said it would try to convince Congress to forgive the payroll taxes. But with no movement from lawmakers, the extra money essentially became a temporary loan that workers had to pay back eventually.

And it’s created an accounting challenge for the bureau, which employed hundreds of thousands of workers temporarily for last year’s national head count.

Difficulty in reaching former workers has led the bureau to defer collecting some of those Social Security taxes.

“We determined that 147,619 employees owed substantially less than what it would cost to collect the debt from them,” said the bureau, which did not answer NPR’s questions about the total amount of money the bureau has decided to stop trying to collect and how it’s covering those costs.

The bureau says that it has sent letters and emails to 28,000 or so former census…