Paychex Sucks

GMKinChicago .... join the club. Paychex did the same exact thing at my company at the end of 2010. The difference is that we did not get a new rep, and my company processes multiple payroll with Paychex and this happened to to two of the companies. As far as W2's, they were wrong, they used a corrupt file for processing W2's (2010 W's issued in 2011). Now this year, I was billed for the W2 shipping with the last pay in December 2011, and billed for the actual printing of the W2's with the first pay in 2012, and I have yet to receive the W2's. When I ask (and I have asked multiple times) I am told that they cannot tell me when the W2's will print or when I will receive them. Paychex sucks.

I had a graphic design business and in 2008 Paychex contacted me and pitched their services to me to help me with my business. I was naive and swayed by the eager representative. I didn't fully understand what they were going to do for me, my accountant was already doing. After speaking with my CPA, I tried to cancel my Paychex account ( this was about 2 months into it). That's when it all began to get really frustrating. Suddenly the eager representative was nowhere to be found. I would be on the phone for sometimes hours in endless vm loops and I'd end up being disconnected or just unable to reach a real person. I tried emailing but would get no response. I even drove to a paychex office and begged to speak to someone and the receptionist said there was no one there and that I should leave my contact number and someone would call me. But no one did.
I was able to cancel the Payroll account, but then had to deal with trying to close the 401k account.
First off they had me open the 401k with $1,000. which was a set up fee. So that was the first chunk of money they put in their pockets. I believed I had cancelled the 401k at the same time I cancelled the Payroll service, but didn't realize that they were different departments that had nothing to do with each other. I finally realized it was still open, though I don't think I had put any contributions towards it. I received a quarterly report showing a small amount of money still in the account - .19 cents. I was sent a letter saying I had to submit a form 5500SF. I thought nothing of it, because I thought the account was closed and had no money in it. BIG MISTAKE on my part. then about December of 2010 I got a letter from Paychex saying I owed them $240. for fund management services! I spent another 2hours on the phone trying to resolve this.The representative assured me that absolutely my account now was closed. But that I had to file these form 5500's. I did file the form 5500's for the last 3 years and for this year.
Yesterday I got a letter from the IRS saying I owe them $8025.00 as a penalty for not filing. May I remind you that the amount I was to file was .19 cents.
I still am receiving Quarterly reports with negative numbers! I gather this means my account is NOT closed as they assured me so many times. Honestly, I'm at the end of my rope.
I am an honest person. I was not trying to cheat the IRS out of anything. Is this really fair? NO... it's ridiculous and I feel like I've been conned. I've been struggling to hang in there. I had to close my once thriving business down. I lost my life savings because of the recession. I'm in debt up to my eyeballs and trying to hold on to my modest house that is underwater. Please, if anyone could advise me on what I could do to fight this, I would really appreciate it .
PAYCHEX IS UNETHICAL!!!!!!!!!

Paychex is simply hired to facilitate payroll as directed by the client. If a client hires and pays and employee without a SS# they've made that mistake. Not Paychex. A Rep can only hound a client so much for the SS#.
It is a great place to work. We are very well trained. But the client needs to take responsibility for their payrolls. I'm NOT saying that they need to take responsibility for mistakes made by their Rep. I will take full responsibility for any mistakes I've made. Everything can be fixed. I'm human. I've made mistakes and I bet I'll make more.

GH - Like other Paychex employees, you are clearly blind to the facts; the real issues are not that the clients give incorrect SSN's, or that you make a mistake, these things happen at all payroll services. The issue is that if you have a major problem beyond the ability of your local CSR to fix and have to deal with the Tax Department, Benefits Division or god forbid the 401k group you are going to be extremely frustrated and possibly stuck with a very expensive bill becuase, although it is a Paychex error, you cannot get anyone on the phone or get an issue resolved and ultimately it is the employer left holding the bag.

If you process your payroll through Paychex online service beware! I was a client of Paychex for over 10 years. Someone hacked my online payroll account and was able to change direct deposit account numbers and when my payroll was processed normally, several paychecks were routed to fraudulent accounts. This was discovered on a Friday, and they do not have a 24 hour hotline. And, as I was speaking to my specialist, and online at the same time, I received an email saying my "Payroll has been processed successfully". I told the rep that I did not process it and it should not be paid. Paychex processed a reversal and was able to recover some money, but not all of the stolen funds.
The communications were poor from the beginning. It took nearly five months to resolve. I requested three items. 1. A written explanation of what happened.
2. A copy of the security procedures in place that would have prevented this.
3. A copy of my Paychex contract.
Paychex would not provide either 1 or 2, stating that for legal reasons they are unable to.
I did recieve a copy of my Paychex contract, which in summary states Paychex is not liable for any fruad, security breach, etc. unless it is perpetrated by a Paychex employee.
It all concluded when Paychex refused to process my payroll unless I paid them the funds not recovered. If I did not, they would cancel my account and pull the funds from my employee's taxes withheld from previous payrolls, and I would be responsible for the payments to the various tax authorities. They did credit my processing fees for about 25% of the amount stolen over the next several months.
I was unable to get any assurance that this could ever be prevented from happening again. Paychex was unable to tell me what procedures to take to prevent this. Therefore, I had to drop Paychex and moved to another payroll service.

I *was* happy with Paychex until today.

I own a small biz and am launching another. The 2nd small biz has on employee who is doing valuable work for me. I'm paying her at the same rate as the manager of my 1st biz who has been with me for several years.

Paychex was under strict instructions to send the lone employees check to my home so the manager of the 1st biz wouldn't know her pay rate. Not that it's his business, but I wanted to avoid hard feelings.

Well, thanks Paychex. You screwed me.

You sent *all* of the checks to the manager of the 1st business. He now knows he's making the same as a new employee and he's about ready to walk, leaving me holding a bag of steaming crap.

You did the one thing that could cause me the most damage and now I'm going to have to dig deep in my pockets to appease that manager.

A stupid, careless mistake that will have thousands of dollars in consequences.

Next time you want to screw me, at least buy me a drink first. You guys suck.

"Unhappy client" how did you know that it wasn't a paychex employee who changed the bank accounts and ran the payroll? The bank accounts that the funds went to should be easily tracable as the banks, since 911 require proof of Identification to open an account. That is also a federal offense, I hope that you reported it to the authorities. "Really pissed off" - I hate to tell you this but you sound like a jerk, a delivery errors happens, if you can't justify your employee's salaries if they accidentaly find out the salaries of other employees then that's your problem.

Paychex is a good company. The idea of what Paychex stands for and the services they want to provide for their clients are only with good intentions. They are a great sales organization. They have over 560,000 clients. Any company that has that many clients cannot be called a bad company. So why is everyone complaining.

Here is the truth...

They are 100% mismanaged. Look at their financials over the last 5 years. No growth in their payroll sales division. They have had a change in CEO, Senior VP ( 3 times), and multiple VP changes in all divisions over the last 5 years. If upper management is not stable, then what do you think their lower management is doing. That kind of change makes things go south very fast.

Dont be mad that you specialist messed things up...be mad that they have no management to go to that can get the job fixed in a timely manor. Be mad that 1 department doesn't talk to the other and they continue to sell you additional services, tack on fees, increase rates and w2 cost because simply there is not enough growth to take to wall street. Don't believe me, just look at the stock. It hasn't moved in almost 5 years.

Good news is they have a new management team in place. Its new. It will take time. It can get better. It is my opinion that you cannot be good at all things. Paychex use to be really great at doing just payroll. It is a shame that going public and the demand to bring numbers to market year after year has made them grow so big so fast and now they can't get out of their own way. I hope they turn it around...until then, there is going to be much more of these issues that keep coming. human error will always happen...never judge a company for that happening...judge them on how fast they fix the problem. Paychex needs to get better at that first then maybe message boards like this would not exist. I am sure they are happy with their 560,000 clients and 2 billion in the bank to justify boards like this.

I don't know for certain, because I can only take their word. They did provide an IP address from where the direct deposit "change" was processed, which was more than 800 miles from my office where I have been processing my payrolls for more than 10 years. Another one of my major concerns. Paychex receiving data changes from an IP address other than normal did not prompt a phone call or even an email asking "Hey is that really you?". Having a 1)User Id 2)Password 3)Selecting an Image 4)PIN were not sufficient to prevent it.
According to their Risk/Security dept. these bank accounts were opened individuals in a "Russian Block" and the chances of recovery are virtually nonexistent. I did file a report with my local authorities, but in the end, they stated they did not have jurisdiction, since Paychex bank where the funds were sent from to the fraudulent account is in another state, I would need to file my report in that state.
Perhaps I should have changed my password, etc. more often, but when I asked Paychex if I knew in advance and told them that I thought someone would try to steal my direct deposits, what should I have done? I received no answer. I can only conclude that there is no security procedure in place that could have prevented it.

Unhappy client - based on what you describe it sounds like you were the victim of a scam where you received an e-mail that had a virus that tracked your keystrokes, they look for financial site login information, cleary they have identified Paychex as a site they want login information for, you should be careful about other banking or financial sites that you use, you might want to make sure that your computer is clean then change all of your logins to those types of sites. Sounds like Paychex should be doing more, there are standards (like flagging strange IP addresses and automotacially notifying clients immediately) I am not sure if they are not doing what theya re supposed to based on those standards, they should be reporting this type of thing when it happens to all clients in the very least? Certainly from a service standpoint the should have reacted much quicker to your inquiry about the phantom payroll and they could have stopped the direct deposits before they went out if you notified them immediatly upn receiving the "a payroll was procesed e-mail" so that being the case I would think that they are liable for the losses. Depending on the amount you might want to file in small claims court against paycheck or contact a lawyer if they refuse to bring you whole.

My company had their Paychex account hacked and a large sum of money was stolen, transferred to other accounts, that no longer exist. It is appalling that Paychex security protocols are so elementary they can be easily compromised. Clearly it is well known, hence all the other posts. Not a single verification was required, nor was any notification of account changes sent. My Chase account has stronger verification than Paychex.

I would choose another provider. We just left Paychex after being with them for 9 years.

I have to say that doing payroll on a web product is a bad idea, it is bad enough if someone gets you bank login, but when it comes to payroll you store all of your employee information in one place, I assume that all of you that know that you were hacked realized that you are responsible to secure your employee information and are notifying your employees and subscribing to identity theft software for them for at least 2 years?

How about Paychex withholding child support and not sending it to the child support recipient? Paychex is holding one month's worth of child support......which happens to be violation of the child support order sent to them (they have acknowledged they received the order).

Broke - If the amount was deducted from an employees check then it is sitting in the employers bank account. If no payment has been made by Paychex, it falls unto the employer to make the payment.

Time, thank you for your response; however, Paychex debits the bank account for the amount of the court ordered child support. I know to be true this because I have been copied on email correspondence between the employer and Paychex. And, yes, the employer will be ultimately responsible for noncompliance but, he pays Paychex to perform this service for him and keep him in compliance. No matter how you look at it, Paychex is not performing its contractual obligations.

I'm 82 years old. I closed my business last August. My employees have not received their W2 forms. They are arrogant, no customer service and the worse company that I've done business with in 82 years. I would not recommend this company to anyone.

Business owners expect Paychex and similar other payroll processing companies to withhold proper applicable taxes and deposit them with proper tax authorities.

We are facing a situation where we have a client with businesses in multiple States and all payroll was processed by NJ division and now the employer faces a huge penalty because city taxes for some employees in some States were not withheld and Paychex is completely refusing to take responsibility for not withholding proper taxes - saying it is business owner's problem!

My employer just changed from TASC to Paychex for FSA and from ADP to Paychex for payroll. The FSA reimbursements are held up indefinitely on miniscule crap. Not looking forward to the next paycheck based on reviews here. I second Grouchy Old Man! Grouch On!!!

I saw this frustration with Paychex on here. I also see it fristhand from ADP customers everyday of the week. My name is Eric Poppel and I am with Supreme Payroll Solutions. I can 100% tell you both are solid companies with strong histories but they do 100% suck in my opinion in 1 area. Small accounts. It seems any account 1-150 employees is considered a small account (my range might be off slightly due to having never worked for either company. They both tend to take this companies as an after thought. Their business model is set up for bigger companies. The newest sales reps area assigned the small accounts. Because of this you get the least experienced employees. The true stars get promoted to medium or bigger account and even if you get a good rep ultimately they will be promoted dooming you to always having a newer less experienced rep. This is their playbook that I have been told from firsthand conversations with former Paychex and ADP employees. So if you are a bigger account (over 150) you probably love ADP or Paychex (you are getting the seasoned rep who can fix things). Smaller you should leave. This is my business advice to you. Come join Supreme Payroll Solutions. www.supremepayroll.net We are SAS 70 Type 2 certified (taxes are safe), offer direct deposit and new hires for free (big for high turnover businesses), certified payroll in 50 states and constantly crush the competition on price and service. We are typically 15%-35% cheaper. For a free quote shoot me an email or give me a call.

Regards

Eric Poppel
Director of Business Development
1-877-752-7555 Toll Free
www.supremepayroll.net

Eric, you should never describe your prices as "cheaper", try "less expensive" next time