QuickBooks and New Mexico Form WC-1: What Employers Need to Know
QuickBooks prefills most of New Mexico's workers' compensation fee form, but several fields require manual review. Here is what each line means.
QuickBooks Desktop can prefill and prepare New Mexico’s quarterly workers’ compensation fee form — Form WC-1 — but employers are still responsible for reviewing the fields the software does not populate automatically and for understanding what each line represents.
Who Has to File
New Mexico requires nearly all employers with employees in the state to carry workers’ compensation coverage and, by extension, to file Form WC-1. This covers most for-profit businesses as well as non-profits and churches. A narrow exception exists for certain non-construction employers with fewer than three employees who are not legally required to carry coverage but have chosen to do so anyway. Even those employers must file the form if they maintain a policy.
The workers’ compensation fee itself is a per-employee quarterly tax, reported and paid to the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department.
What QuickBooks Fills In
When employer, payroll, and employee data are all entered correctly in QuickBooks ahead of time, the software handles most of the form automatically. The remaining fields — the ones QuickBooks cannot derive from existing payroll records — are the ones that tend to cause confusion.
Fields That May Need Manual Attention
CRS ID Number
The Combined Reporting System number is assigned by the Taxation and Revenue Department and is sometimes referred to simply as the New Mexico tax ID. QuickBooks may not populate this field if it was never entered in company setup.
EAN ID Number
The Employer Account Number is issued by the New Mexico Department of Labor and is used for quarterly unemployment insurance reports. It is not required to file the WC-1, so employers can leave it blank without issue.
Line 1 — Number of Covered Workers
This is the count of covered employees on the last working day of the calendar quarter being reported. QuickBooks calculates this figure automatically. If the business had no covered employees during the quarter, the software enters zero.
Line 2 — Assessment Fee
The fee is a flat amount per covered employee per quarter. The total is split between the employee and the employer, with each contributing a portion. QuickBooks multiplies the per-employee fee by the headcount on Line 1. The result should be either the full per-employee amount for each worker or zero — there is no partial or prorated charge.
Line 3 — Penalty
If the Taxation and Revenue Department has notified the employer of a penalty assessment, that amount goes here. QuickBooks has no way of knowing about penalties on its own, so this field must be entered manually when applicable.
Line 4 — Interest
Similarly, if the state has assessed interest — typically because of a late or underpaid filing — the employer enters that amount on Line 4 based on the notice received.
Zero Reports
Employers whose businesses temporarily have no covered employees in a given quarter are not excused from filing. They must submit a zero report indicating no covered workers and remit no payment. QuickBooks handles this scenario by entering zero on Line 1, which cascades through the calculation on Line 2.
Where to Look for Additional Help
For field-level guidance that QuickBooks does not cover, the form window itself includes a Help button. The on-screen help addresses general form navigation as well as specific troubleshooting for individual fields that did not populate as expected.
Employers who consistently see blank fields where data should appear may have gaps in their QuickBooks payroll setup — company information, employee records, or payroll items that feed into state forms. Verifying that those records are complete before the quarter ends typically resolves most prefill issues on the WC-1.