Trump left a $7 million mess after delaying census workers’ payroll taxes

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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

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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.

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The bureau says that it has sent letters and emails to 28,000 or so former census workers who owe unpaid taxes.

«It’s kind of a shock seeing that email from the Census Bureau just so long after the fact,» says Alex Almeida of Phoenix, who received notices in September, close to a year after ending a clerk job at a local census office in November 2020. «It was very upsetting in a way, like this is the thanks we get for all our efforts.»

The deadline for paying the deferred taxes is the end of this year, according to the IRS.