Too short a lookback and you miss an older payroll tax problem. Too long and you pay to check periods that were never in question. Here is how to decide how far back your reconciliation should go.

One payroll tax notice rarely arrives alone, especially during a growth stretch. A missing registration or a half-finished unemployment account keeps generating fresh agency activity until someone fixes the root cause, and every notice that sits unresolved gets more expensive the longer it waits. Here's exactly how the first notice becomes the fifth, and what actually stops the pattern instead of just answering each letter.