Hi All, this is somewhat of a mix of a tax question, an investment question, an employment question, and a relationship question, so naturally it probably fits best here.
The short background. My wife works for a very small company. Her salary is relatively low, but mine is high enough that we're able to both maximize our 401ks. For the first half of 2017, we only contributed to get our matches as we were saving up to buy a house. We bought a house in the summer and put less down than we planned. Thus, we turned our contributions up in the second half of the year so that we would both make it to $18k, using the extra down payment cash as a buffer. I went ahead and made the contribution changes for both of us myself, both through our respective 401k web portals.
Mine went through fine. Her's ... didn't. Of course, the site said to wait a full billing cycle, so I waited through July, and it didn't happen then. I asked my wife to look into it, but she didn't contact her boss until after August. At that point he got back to her and said that whoever was in charge of servicing the 401k wasn't paying attention to the web portal notifications, but he could talk to them directly. Strange, but ok. For reference, the 401k is held by a large financial company, but seems to be serviced through a small local firm. I assume this is normal for small companies?
Regardless, they informed us that they could still hit the $18k if they took all of the rest of my wife's salary through the end of the year, plus her bonus. Fine by me, so we said yes. We did not receive a paycheck (or maybe we did receive a small one) nor a bonus for her for the rest of the year. We also did see increased 401k contributions, although I need to review them in more detail to be sure.
I should note, at some point they did deposit a normal monthly amount in our account, and then later reversed the transaction and deposited a lower amount (which itself was strange because we were told there would be nothing). She also received a lump sum into her 401k at the end of the year for her bonus, plus she gets a large employer contributed matching chunk from the owners because she is not a HCE. I'm not sure if I can separate which part of that amount is our contribution or their contribution on her statement.
Then, we fail to receive a W-2 in January. When we ask in early February, they send us a W-2c due to the reversed transaction I mentioned above. The W-2c lists zero money withheld for Federal taxes (box 2), even though my wife's pay stubs show consistent deductions. I ask about it and they send me the original W-2 which has the Federal tax contributions listed, but not the larger 401k contributions (in box 12?). None of it seems to be consistent with anything I can see, and it's very hard to interpret what they did at the end of the year as it doesn't show up with much clarity on her pay stubs.
The kicker is that the final 401k contribution is listed at ~13k, not 18k, which may just be the end of it (which is frustrating as that's a good thousand or two in extra taxes but not the end of the world I guess).
Since then, I've read that we can still somehow contribute to last year's 401k up until tax day (similar to how IRA dates work), but I shudder at trying to work that out with a company that can't even keep track of our desired regular contribution amounts.
The final kicker is that my wife is somewhat intimidated by her boss, and hates having to go to him to ask him to talk to their financial company (or CPA or whoever is in charge of all of this). I just want to be able to talk to the people who can figure this out directly, but I have no idea who that is. Is that my wife's boss? Is that his CPA? The 401k administrator? Hell, at this point I don't even know what questions to ask to try and resolve the under-contribution, let alone the seemly random pay stubs and W-2s we received once we asked for the increased contributions.
I guess it may boil down to us just letting it go this year while making sure 2018 gets handled properly (looking at this month's pay stubs, my wife's contribution amount is still way less than the desired $1,550). I feel like someone is really screwing things up, but I'm not sure who and I just don't know what to do or who to talk to at this point. I know this is more of a rant than a set of direct questions, but any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
P.S. - I'm happy to comb through records and answer specific questions if you think it would help.
