I Forgot to Run Payroll All Year. Now What?

#The rule this all runs on

An S-corp owner who performs services for the business is generally an employee of that business for employment tax purposes, and payments for those services are wages. The Form 1120-S instructions put it directly: distributions and other payments by an S corporation to a corporate officer must be treated as wages to the extent the amounts are reasonable compensation for services rendered.

Read that carefully, because the shape of the whole fix is in it. The question is not “how do I create a salary I never paid.” It is “how much of what I already paid myself was compensation for my work, and how do I report that correctly.”

Wages generally arise from remuneration actually or constructively paid for employment, which can include noncash and cash-equivalent forms, not from the act of running payroll. Payroll is the withholding and reporting machinery. That distinction is what makes a closed year fixable at all.

The converse also holds, and it matters: not every payment to an owner is compensation. A genuine loan repayment, a return of capital, or a distribution beyond what is reasonable for the services performed is not wages. The question is always what the payment was for.

#Why this pattern draws attention

When money comes out as a distribution instead of a salary, it skips Social Security and Medicare tax. Counting both the employee and the employer halves, which as an owner you effectively bear, those run 15.3% on wages up to $184,500. Above that the Social Security piece stops but Medicare does not, continuing at 2.9% with no cap. An Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% applies to the employee above filing status thresholds, and note that an employer must begin withholding it once that employer pays an individual more than $200,000 in a year, regardless of the employee’s filing status. Those two thresholds are not the same number, which is why some people owe it and some get it back at filing.

Two cases mark the range of what happens when this is examined.

In Radtke, a lawyer was his firm’s sole shareholder, sole director, and only full-time employee. He took no salary and received $18,225 in dividends. The entire amount was treated as wages, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed in 1990.

The Watson case, decided by the Eighth Circuit in 2012, is more instructive, because the owner did pay himself. A CPA with roughly 20 years of experience took a $24,000 salary in each of 2002 and 2003 while taking distributions of $203,651 and $175,470. The court set reasonable compensation at $93,000 a year and recharacterized about $69,000 of distributions per year as wages, with the employment tax assessed accordingly.

Note the direction in both: the IRS re-labeled payments that had already been made rather than inventing wages. That is the same underlying principle you apply when you fix this yourself. The procedures differ, though. A contested assessment and a voluntary correction follow different rules on withholding, on collecting the employee share, and on collection generally, so do not read these cases as a template for the mechanics.

#Where you are on the calendar

#Still inside the tax year

This is the cheapest place to be, and it is where the surprise usually lands in your favor. But the reason it is cheap depends on a distinction worth being precise about, because the two available moves are not the same move.

Option one: pay new wages before year end. You run a real payroll in, say, December, for reasonable compensation covering your work. This is a payment made in December, so December is its payday.

Here is the part that gets stated wrong constantly: federal deposit due dates are driven by when wages are paid, not by when the work was performed. A monthly schedule depositor deposits employment taxes by the 15th day of the following month. A semiweekly depositor deposits based on the payday, following the Wednesday or Friday rule.

So a payroll actually paid in December, by a monthly depositor, generally has its deposit due the following January 15. Made on time, there is no late-deposit penalty, because nothing was late. The obligation did not exist until the wages were paid.

Option two: treat money you already took as the wages. This is the recharacterization described above, and it does not get the same answer. Those payments have their own, earlier paydays. A distribution taken in March was paid in March, and the deposit deadline that attaches to it is March’s, not December’s. Recharacterizing it does not move it forward, so late deposits are genuinely possible here.

That difference is the whole reason the two options are worth separating. The right mix depends on how much you already took, when you took it, and what the defensible compensation figure is.

If the deposit is late, the penalty is tiered by lateness, and the tiers do not stack. Only the highest applicable rate applies:

#The year has closed

Once the year closes, two things change, and the second one is where most published advice goes wrong.

First, you can no longer make a new payment inside that year. A check written in February is February’s wages. You have not lost the ability to report correctly the payments you actually made during the closed year, but you cannot manufacture a payment that did not happen.

Second, recharacterized amounts land in the quarter they were paid, not in a year-end bucket. Two steps sit behind that. First you determine which payments were compensation at all, which is fact-specific and rarely means every dollar you withdrew. Then whatever is treated as wages belongs to the date it was actually or constructively paid. Payments spread across the year therefore reach back into quarters whose deadlines have already passed, and recharacterizing them does not move them to Q4.

Note the contrast with the in-year option above. Genuinely new wages paid in the fourth quarter can compensate services performed across the whole year, and they carry that quarter’s deadlines. It is only the recharacterization of earlier payments that is pinned to earlier dates.

There are further wrinkles that are easy to miss and expensive to get wrong: correcting prior-year federal income tax withholding is subject to its own limits, the employee share of FICA has rules about who pays it and when, an amended Form 940 may be needed, and state payroll agencies run their own corrections on their own calendars.

We are deliberately not printing a form-by-form recipe for the closed-year case, because the right sequence genuinely depends on which returns exist, which quarters the money moved in, and what was withheld. A recipe that fits one owner produces wrong filings for the next. This is the point where the cost of getting help is smaller than the cost of filing the wrong thing.

Where several years are involved, treat each separately and settle the order before filing anything. A correction to one year can change the others, and that interaction is the most common place this gets expensive.

#The information return penalties, scoped honestly

Once a W-2 is late, two separate requirements are in play. Filing it with the Social Security Administration is one, under IRC §6721. Furnishing the copy to the employee is another, under §6722. They are assessed separately, so a failure on both can be charged under both.

For W-2s required to be filed and furnished in 2027, covering 2026 wages:

Source: Rev. Proc. 2025-32 §4.57 and §4.58. Note that the per-return amounts above are the same regardless of business size. What changes with size is the annual cap: for a business with average annual gross receipts of $5,000,000 or less the caps are $244,500, $698,500, and $1,397,000 across the three timing tiers, versus $698,500, $2,095,500, and $4,191,500 above that threshold, applied separately to each section. Intentional disregard has no annual cap, and its 10% measure is based on the amounts required to be reported correctly.

For a single-owner S-corp the per-form figures are usually the operative numbers, though the caps aggregate across covered returns and statements, so a company filing many 1099s could reach them on the strength of everything else it files.

Whether you are charged under one section or both depends on which failures occurred and whether any relief applies, so treat the per-section figures as the building block rather than assuming they always double.

#Two shortcuts that do not work

#Issuing yourself a 1099

Whether a worker is an employee is a facts-based determination, and labeling a payment as contractor income does not settle it. For a shareholder-officer performing substantial services, the employee characterization is the expected one.

The practical problem is that reporting the amount as self-employment income on your personal return does not extinguish the corporation’s employment tax obligation. You have added an incorrect information return to the file without resolving the underlying liability, which means the eventual cleanup now includes undoing the 1099.

#Reclassifying with a journal entry alone

Moving an amount from “distributions” to “officer compensation” in your books changes the books. It does not file a 941, produce a W-2, or remit anything.

The entry is part of the fix. The filings, the tax actually paid or deposited, and any interest are the rest of it. Books that disagree with your filed returns are a worse position than books that plainly show the problem.

#Setting the number

Reasonable compensation is fact-specific and there is no percentage in the law. The IRS looks at what you actually do, your training and experience, the time you devote, what comparable businesses pay for comparable work, and the company’s other income sources, including the work of non-shareholder employees and the contribution of capital and equipment.

Two notes for a catch-up situation:

1. A number that is obviously too low invites the exact adjustment you are trying to avoid. If you are fixing this voluntarily, fixing it at a defensible number is the point of the exercise.
2. Profit is context, not a ceiling. Compensation is measured against the services performed. A reasonable salary can exceed the year’s profit and create or increase a loss, and that outcome is not automatically wrong. A thin year is a fact worth documenting rather than a rule that caps the number.

#Which penalty relief actually applies

Be precise here, because asking for the wrong relief wastes the request.

First Time Abate covers failure to file under §6651(a)(1) and the partnership and S-corp equivalents, failure to pay under §6651(a)(2) and (a)(3), and failure to deposit under §6656. A clean prior history is necessary but not sufficient: you generally also need your required returns filed and any tax either paid or covered by an acceptable payment arrangement.

First Time Abate does not cover the §6721 and §6722 information return penalties. The late W-2 sits outside it. Relief there runs through different channels, including reasonable cause, which turns on your specific facts rather than on a clean history.

Neither goes to the tax itself. Both go to the penalty, and neither is a reason to delay the underlying correction.

#What to change so it does not repeat

In the cases we see, this usually is not a decision to skip payroll. It is that payroll was never put on a schedule, so it stayed something to remember.

• Put yourself on a scheduled payroll so it runs without a decision.
• Let a payroll provider handle the deposits and the 941s. Both the deposits and the filings carry their own penalties, and both are the easiest part to automate away.
• Revisit the number once a year rather than never.

#Common questions

Can I take a bigger salary next year to make up for it?

No. Wages belong to the year the remuneration was actually or constructively paid. Next year’s salary is next year’s wages, and it does not resolve the prior year. The prior year gets fixed on its own filings.

Does an owner have to take a salary in a year with no distributions?

The rule ties wage treatment to remuneration paid for services, so a year with no payments to you at all is a materially different situation from one with meaningful distributions and no wages. Be careful with “took nothing out,” though. Personal expenses paid by the company, property transferred to you, certain fringe benefits, and amounts booked as shareholder loans can all count as remuneration even when no ordinary distribution was recorded. Confirm your own facts rather than applying either version as a general rule.

Will fixing this trigger an audit?

We are not able to tell you how a specific correction will be received, and anyone who claims otherwise is guessing. What is knowable: correcting it inside the year can avoid the late-deposit penalty entirely, and the highest §6656 tier by its terms applies only after the IRS has contacted you. Those are reasons to move first rather than wait.

What if this has gone on for several years?

Handle the years separately and settle the order before filing. This is the case where getting help first tends to cost less than getting it after.

#Where this leaves you

The mechanical part is well-defined: determine how much of what you took was compensation, get it onto the right year’s filings, remit the tax, and request the relief that actually applies. The judgment parts are the compensation number and the sequencing across years, and those are where doing it alone usually costs more than it saves.

If you are in this, reach out before you file anything. Bring the years involved, what you took out and when, and which payroll returns were actually filed. Those are the facts that scope the problem fastest, though the full path also depends on your services, your deposit schedule, what was withheld, and your state’s rules.