Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments are prepared and released periodically to officials of employers covered under the Railroad Retirement and Railroad Unemployment Insurance Acts to assist them in their responsibilities under the Acts.  This web site version duplicates the material that is released in binder-form.

The Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments provides instructions to sickness payors on reporting requirements under the Railroad Retirement Act (RRA). Such payers must file reports with the Railroad Retirement Board's Division of Compensation and Certification (DCC) within the Bureau of Research and Employment Accounts. These instructions cover forms and correspondence relating to the following subjects:

• annual tax and earnings reports of creditable sick pay;
• adjusted reports of creditable sick pay; and,
• clarification of reports of creditable sick pay in order to correctly credit payee records.

What's Not in Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments

The Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments do not provide exhaustive instructions for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) forms which you must complete for sickness payments. Instead, these instructions provide basic information for IRS forms as they relate to DCC's function. For example, IRS Form CT-1 , Employer's Annual Railroad Retirement Tax Return, has a relationship to creditable sick pay, so the instructions describe the tax on sick pay and the purpose and completion of Form CT-1. But the Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments cannot provide definitive answers to railroad retirement tax questions because Form CT-1 is an IRS form.

How to Use Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments

These instructions may be used as a reference source; you do not have to read the instructions in its entirety. The booklet is organized into ten numbered chapters. Cross references are used to guide the user to other sections of the instructions with related information about a subject. The chapters follow the process order in which a sickness payer needs to know the information-prerequisite concept knowledge, followed by descriptions, instructions and examples for all required forms and reports, and then followed by information which payers must know about reports even after the original reports are submitted.

It is important to use the most current version of the Reporting Instructions for Creditable Sickness Payments. The effective date of each page is shown in the heading.

Implementation of Law

Because the instructions are based on the implementation of the RRA and the regulations of the Railroad Retirement Board (RRB), legal citations are in some instances included for your reference. A copy of the Railroad Retirement Act of 1974 may be purchased from the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. You may also purchase a copy of the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 20, Parts 1 to 399, which includes the requirements and forms prescribed for reporting to the RRB and the penalties for failure to report. This is published annually, usually during June, with revisions through March 31 of that year. In addition, a library with a public documents section may have copies of the RRA and regulations, or may be able to secure loan copies from another library.