Infor/Lawson Employee's address line 1 is 57 characters but W-2 allows 30 characters

We would like to know how other companies, using MHC to print their W-2s, are handling thefollowing issue:

Infor/Lawson allows 57 characters in Address Line 1. Employees are able to enter their address in ESS and they can enter up to 57 characters.
IRS requires 30 characters on the W-2 forms.
For those with an address with more than 30 characters in Address line 1, their address is truncated in their W-2 and forms are returned due to incomplete addresses.
This was an Infor change from 30 to 57 with the Infor version 10 upgrade.

We have more than 60,000 employees and more than 500 employees with an address 1 line with more than 30 characters. We will have to clean up their address before sending a file to MHC to print the W-2s but because ESS allows more than 30 characters it will be a yearly clean-up process.

Thanks.

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Infor Lawson Human Resources Group - Discussion

Comments

unknown

Some of the 3rd parties we send files to also have a shorter field length for address so we have a monthly audit that looks for addresses that are too long and we manually update them throughout the year.

slivak

I built an automated interface in .NET that pulls all newly-hired employees from our applicant tracking system (Silk Road) into our Lawson system. Before creating the applicant record in PA31, it looks up the employee's address on the U.S. Postal Service's web site to ensure that it's a deliverable address (automatically fails over to MelissaData.com.)

The main benefit is that the combination of the USPS and MelissaData lookups catch all misspellings, missing apartment numbers, transposed digits, strips all punctuation and applies standardized USPS regulation abbreviations. Once standardized to USPS regulations, VERY few addresses exceed 30 characters on line one. For those that do, I follow the USPS regs and stack information from the bottom up - main street address on line 2 (i.e. 1234 Really Long Name St), apartments/box numbers on line 1 (Apt 525):

APT 525
1234 REALLY LONG NAME ST
SOMEWHERE US 98765-4321

A notice to our HR Specialists is generated for any addresses that fails both USPS and MelissaData lookups so they can follow up with the employee to ensure we have their current, accurate mailing address.

We also run all of our employees' addresses (active plus any terminated in the last 12 months) through MelissaData's National Change of Address (NCOA) service each November. This picks up any employees who have changed their address and forgot to notify HR, and ensures employees who move after they terminated will receive their mailed W2 forms. My Payroll department sends me a big bag of peanut M&Ms every February now to celebrate that they have virtually NO returned W2's.

slivak

If you don't want to go through all of the programming necessary to automate your address validation, I would highly recommend running that last step -- running all of your employee addresses (current and terminated in last 12 months) through MelissaData's address standardization and National Change of Address services. It's cheap (last I remember it was under $100 to process 10,000 addresses), fast (same-day turnaround) and you can format the spreadsheet they return to you as a Microsoft Add-Ins upload and update all your employees' addresses at once. (Sort by length of Address1 line so you can identify and split all of your problem addresses before you upload them to Lawson.)

0712131256598360.doc

bhillz

Very nice. And kudos to your payroll department for noticing/rewarding the effort.

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