In the end of each fiscal year employers have to report the amount of earnings paid out to their employees and the amount of taxes deducted from such earnings. For this purpose they have to file W-2 form with the IRS. This document is prepared by an employer and includes such information as an employee's personal details and SSN, an employer's ID number and full name and details about money paid and taxes withheld.
The strong requirement is to submit a document on time. The deadline of filing a form with SSA is January 31 and filing with employees is before January 31 in order to have time for correcting mistakes if any. According to the situation, it is possible to request for 30-day extension of filing period. For this purpose you have to complete form IRS-8809, extension application, clearly specifying the reasons. Note that extension application is not guaranteed, so try to meet the deadline to avoid fines. In case of failure to submit W-2 in the specified terms, you can be incurred penalties.
The IRS incurs fines for those who failure to submit a form properly, i.e. it is not fled on time or it is completed inaccurately. In case you can provide reasonable cause for your failure, you may avoid payment of fines. However, it is not guaranteed that the IRS will accept your explanation. The penalties for small business whose annual gross receipt is up to 5 million for 3 recent fiscal years are usually smaller. If you failure to submit W-2 in a timely manner intentionally, the fines will be much higher. One more reason to be incurred penalties is failure to supply W-3, compilation/summary return, which shows the totals from W-2 forms which you submitted for employees.
Here find some more cases when you are liable for penalties:
If the number of document is more than 250, you can easily file W-2 online. Following all the abovementioned regulations and requirements will help you to avoid extra payments.