FOLLOW US

A Michigan community college and the U.S. government have resolved a federal lawsuit involving penalties imposed after the school missed a deadline for filing employee wage reporting forms with tax authorities.

The case stemmed from Schoolcraft Community College District’s challenge to approximately $233,000 in penalties and interest assessed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after the institution filed W-2 and W-3 wage statements late for the 2017 tax year.

Court documents indicated that the reporting delay occurred during a period when the college’s president was seriously ill and unable to supervise payroll administration. Responsibility for completing the filings was transferred between several employees, but communication failures and administrative confusion contributed to the missed deadline.

The college later discovered that the wage data had not been successfully transmitted to the Social Security Administration’s business reporting system, meaning federal authorities had no official record of updated employee wage information for thousands of staff members.

Once the error was identified in 2018, the school uploaded the required forms to the government portal in August of that year, attempting to correct the reporting oversight. Despite the corrective submission, the IRS subsequently issued a late-filing penalty totaling roughly $219,000, plus additional interest charges.

Schoolcraft argued that the filing failure was unintentional and resulted from reasonable administrative miscommunication rather than deliberate noncompliance. The college also contended that federal authorities did not provide an adequate opportunity to demonstrate reasonable cause before imposing the financial penalty.

Legal filings from the institution claimed that the IRS enforcement approach was unusually aggressive given the school’s public educational mission. The college asserted that a revenue officer assigned to the case concluded that reasonable cause did not exist, which the school disputed.

The government initially maintained that the college had failed to meet regulatory filing obligations and noted that the institution had experienced prior reporting issues. Federal lawyers argued that internal management problems within the payroll department contributed to the compliance failure.

In earlier proceedings, a federal district court allowed the lawsuit to move forward, ruling that the college was not required to demonstrate a flawless administrative record to seek penalty relief. However, the court dismissed constitutional arguments asserting that the penalty violated excessive fine protections, ruling that such claims should have been raised during administrative appeals.