Tax law forces Central Fire to make change
By Nathaniel Underwood
Members of the Central Fire and EMS District decided last Thursday that, due to changes in federal tax law that have made the bookkeeping for the department more time consuming, they would take steps to try to reduce the load placed on the city of Colby’s office, which currently provides the accounting services for the district.
The new law in question makes $600 per year exempt from federal taxes for employees of the department. However, it is the first $50 of each month that is exempt, rather than just a lump sum at the end of the year.
The paperwork associated with this change has increased the time it takes the city of Colby’s clerk’s office to do the district’s accounting each month, and as such, the city of Colby was looking to have their monthly pay from the district increased from $500 to $800 per month if the current situation remained the same. It was noted at the meeting that the city clerk’s office spends about two days a month on the accounting for the district.
In addition, the city of Colby noted that additional time was being spent because of the way that the department was breaking up the paychecks of each employee into different categories, depending on the various roles they were in over the pay period. “I talked with [Colby city clerk] Connie [Gurtner] about it and she said that so much time is spent breaking these timesheets apart to try to get them into different categories,” board president Larry Oehmichen said at last Thursday’s Central Fire and EMS meeting. “Sometimes it
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takes two hours to do it and I wondered if that was necessary. She said that the board asked for it to be done that way, is that correct?”
“They asked that it be done, I think it was at the beginning, so they could break everything down and know where most of the wages were coming from,” fire chief Joe Mueller answered. “So this much was EMS, this much was fire, this much was on-call pay.”
“They are all totaled at the end, so if that’s all they would have to worry about is to just look at that total, I would think that would save them a ton of time,” Mueller added.
The board focused on a way to try to make the bookkeeping process less arduous, as several members noted that too much time was being spent on it. After some discussion, the board believed that eliminating the breakdown on the pay stubs would be the best solution to the problem.
The initial concerns over how much was being spent on specific parts of wages was no longer an issue for the board, so removing the extra work being put in to provide that information seemed pertinent at this time. The primary problem with moving away from the breakdown that was suggested at the meeting was that some employees had gotten used to seeing it on their pay stubs.
“The only difference would be, if you eliminate the breakdown, we might get some grievance from somebody who was really keeping track and thinking they may have lost two dollars. Where did they lose it?” Mueller said. “Because there’s people that keep track – they did this much on-call time, they did this many calls, they went to training, so this is what they should make.”
However, it was noted that the stations themselves would still have the breakdowns of the hours and that employees who were curious could ask for that information; it just would not be included on the pay stubs. This information would also still be available for when the department would look at applying for EMS or fire specific grants.
With the move to eliminate the breakdown, the board did not increase the monthly amount budgeted towards accounting, saying that they would want to see how much time would be saved by making this adjustment before making any further changes.
