County scrambles to bring election workers in compliance with IRS

In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, county governments across the state have been paying potentially thousands of poll workers as contractors instead of as part-time employees, skirting a lot of payroll requirements in the process.

County governments pay poll workers $60 a day in South Carolina and have treated them as independent contractors not subject to the paperwork, income reporting, withholding, minimum wages and government hiring requirements such as drug tests and background checks that are required of regular employees.

According to a 2000 IRS memo, poll workers must be treated like county employees, a discrepancy the IRS raised with the S.C. State Elections Commission in the fall, said commission spokesman Chris Whitmire.

"Poll workers should always have been treated as employees. There's been a misunderstanding all this time until the IRS pointed it out to us," Whitmire said.

That message is just reaching county governments that are being burdened with rehiring hundreds of workers and filing reams of paperwork.

Beaufort County administrator Gary Kubic said he was just briefed Monday morning about the matter, which affects an estimated 400 to 600 county poll workers who must be rehired by April 15 to be in place for an April 26 school district bond referendum.

Monday afternoon, the Beaufort County Council granted Kubic's request for a one-time exemption to the county's hiring requirements for drug testing and background checks of these poll workers "for expediency." Kubic emphasized that it is a short-term solution to let the referendum proceed and to buy time to comply in future elections.

For each potential Beaufort County employee, the county pays $18 for drug testing and $60 to $90 for a background check, said county spokeswoman Suzanne Larson. That means the county could be facing more than $30,000 in unexpected costs for screening poll workers down the road.

Whitmire said the state commission had heard those concerns and relayed them to the IRS. "Pretty much what the IRS said was, 'That's not our concern,'" Whitmire said.

The federal minimum wage is also a problem. Neither Whitmire nor county controller Tom Henrikson said they knew if the reclassification would trigger the hourly pay requirement, which stands at $5.85 now, but will increase to $6.55 per hour in July and $7.25 per hour in July 2009. On election days, poll workers' shifts last 12 hours or more, meaning they were earning about $5 an hour at a flat $60 per day.

Henrikson said the county is looking into possible minimum wage exemptions, and Whitmire said the commission said federal agencies will exempt poll workers from Social Security withholding.