About
A number, and the date it started.
WithholdWatch exists because of a specific, ordinary failure: a small business pays a subcontractor a few hundred dollars, does not collect a W-9 because it is a small job, keeps hiring them, and finds out in January that the threshold was crossed in May. By then the form is hard to get and the money that should have been withheld is already out the door.
Design decisions
What we decided, and why
- 01
The headline number contains no forecast
It would have been easy to show a projected year-end figure as the main number — it is bigger, and bigger sells. It also falls on most days of the year for reasons the customer never caused, which turns the one screen they came for into a screen they stop trusting. The headline is what is already required on payments already made. It only moves when something real changes.
- 02
Two figures that disagree are shown as two figures
The projected year-end figure and the conservative ceiling do not agree, because the rule they encode is genuinely unsettled. They are rendered together, always, with the gap between them visible. Collapsing them into one number would be a choice presented as a measurement.
- 03
An unknown is never a zero
A tax year whose threshold has not been published is not a year with a threshold of zero. A payee whose prior-year status is unrecorded is not a payee who filed. Every one of those is its own state on screen, in words, because the alternative renders a confident $0.00 over a workspace with real liability in it.
- 04
We do not hold the number that would make us useful
WithholdWatch stores four digits of a taxpayer number and refuses the rest. That means it cannot file for you and cannot verify a W-9 against the IRS. It also means there is nothing here worth stealing, and we would rather be less capable than be the place that lost a list of taxpayer numbers.
- 05
We do not touch classification
Whether someone is an employee or a contractor is a legal judgement with consequences we are not qualified to influence. No field, screen, export or sentence in this product hints at an answer, and that is a constraint on the code, not a style preference.
First release
Where it actually is
WithholdWatch is at its first release. It is more honest to say what that means than to leave it to be discovered.
- Five of the six features are built and working end to end. The sixth, Crossing Alerts, has its rules screen and stores what you set, but delivers no message yet — so it is marked in development everywhere it is named, and what is missing is said plainly on the screen itself.
- There are no customers to quote, so there are no logos, no testimonials and no usage numbers on this site. The worked example on the landing page is the calculation itself, run against the real published figures.
- WithholdWatch has not been audited by anyone. There is no compliance badge on the security page because there is nothing to put on it.
- It covers federal information-return thresholds for United States payers. Not state requirements, and not any other country.
The standard
The test we hold it to
Every figure on this website is read at render time from the same table the product reads. If the threshold changes, this site changes with it — not because someone remembered to update the copy, but because there is no copy of the number anywhere to update. Where a figure cannot be read, the page says so rather than printing a plausible substitute.
That is a small thing, and it is the whole argument. A product that will not print a number it cannot justify is the only kind worth using for this.