Payroll
Major Payroll Provisions of the New Covid-19 Stimulus
Jan. 07, 2021
The big items of note in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA, 2021) include extending and expanding existing provisions from prior 2020 federal COVID-19 legislation such as the employee retention credit, paid sick and family leave credits, and Paycheck Protection Program.
[This article first appeared on the Thomson Reuters blog.]
After much negotiating, the latest COVID-19 relief bill was signed into law by President Trump on December 27, 2020. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA, 2021) has more than 5,500 pages and comes with a $2.3 trillion price tag – $900 billion in stimulus relief for the COVID-19 pandemic and $1.4 trillion in omnibus spending for the 2021 fiscal year. The law includes a number of payroll-related provisions aimed at helping employers and workers close out 2020 and begin 2021.
The editors of the Thomson Reuters Checkpoint payroll news team feel it would not be too bold to write that 2020 has been a challenging one. The 2019-2020 year-end process that payroll professionals go through seemed like it never ended once the COVID-19 pandemic federal legislation was enacted in March of 2020.
These laws included the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act (FFCRA) and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. After the FFCRA and CARES Act were signed into law, there was plenty of federal government agency guidance from the IRS, Department of Labor and other agencies, as well as state and local legislation, executive orders, and even more guidance.
Now, as the 2020-2021 payroll year-end process gets into full swing, it appears to be deja vous all over again with the CAA, 2021. This massive bill contains many extenders and expanders for existing provisions from the FFCRA and CARES Act that involve payroll.
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