Online W-2 Election: Receive paper/online buttons unavailable

[Former Member]

We’re implementing the Online W-2 for ESS. In the Election process, after selecting the tax company in the Overview of Elections, the buttons “Receive W-2 in paper” and “Receive W-2 online” are both disabled and Unavailable. They’re on the screen, but not available for use. The buttons are active in the component configuration. Any idea what’s keeping them from going active? It appears that everyone’s set to a default of receiving the W-2 in paper only. I’ve run a security trace on our users but there weren’t any authorization failures.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Steve,

Glad things worked out for you!! It sounds like you did some nice work with your custom app.

In case others are seeing my problem, below is what I received from SAP this morning:

Your message has reached Development Support. We were able to identify

the cause of the issue and have created note 1953692 to address it.

The note is in Pilot status right now, so any customer who wishes to use it immediately should contact OSS and request to be added to the Pilot. Otherwise it will be added to a future HR support pack. It works fine in our SAP development environment.

I'm closing out the thread since my issue is resolved. Cheers!

Jay

[Former Member]

Hi Steve,

I just received below from SAP regarding my OSS message:

"I have further analyzed the issue with the development team and it was

found out the issue happens because the tax company name (FFI) is

shorter the the usual 4-digit length.

Therefore I would like to let you know I have forwarded your incident

to the Development Team.

They will contact you soon to proceed with the analysis on your issue."

We have several tax companies with 3-character names. So apparently the Online W2 doesn't work in this case. I'm assuming that I'll receive an SAP Pilot note shortly to solve my problem. If you're also using 3-character tax companies, I suggest that you stop investigating your issue and wait as well. Unfortunately I burned a lot of time and effort debugging, reconfiguring, etc. trying to get it to work. Also, SAP thought it was a problem in my system first, so it took several iterations before they found the coding problem.

Just wanted to update you. I'll reply again once I get an SAP Note number.

Jay

[BearcatSteve]

Hi, Jay -

Glad to hear you're making progress!  That doesn't seem to be our particular problem with the SAP-delivered election webdynpro, though, since we only have one company code here, and it's 4-characters long.

The message I mentioned above was an authorization problem, and we now have all our security issues squared away.  We created a custom ABAP webdynpro application for the election, since we wanted to display a disclosure statement that the user must acknowledge before choosing the online option.  It's not a very complicated app - the UI elements are a checkbox (I agree..), 2 radio buttons, and a Save button.  We did use the delivered W2 Display webdynpro, but we configured it slightly using the FPM tools.  We were also pleasantly surprised to see that the system automatically reverts back to paper if an employee is Inactive or Withdrawn, so we didn't have to include 3228 in our Separation/Leave processes.

We're moving this to production this week, and we're allowing a pilot group to try it out for the 2013 W2s with a larger-scale rollout planned for next year.

Best of luck, and thanks again for sharing your findings.... It was EXTREMELY helpful.

- Steve

[BearcatSteve]

Hi, Jay -

We ended up just creating a pretty simple webdynpro application to update IT3228 with the election information, and then we had no problems with the delivered webdynpro for displaying the online W2.... for our developers with elevated access.  However, when we try to display an online W-2 using the same level of access as a typical ESS user, we get a short dump in the UI building block class CL_FPM_GUIBB_BASE_RENDER when it tries to render the button to display a W-2 (ON_GEN_PDF).

So, we're making *some* headway....

- Steve

[Former Member]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the update. We're still working with SAP. They pointed a difference for infotype 3228 that we had in view V_T7XSSPERSUBTYP in our test client compared with client 000. I updated our system settings to match, but the buttons remain unavailable.

My SAP message is High Priority, so I'm hoping we'll have it figured out soon. I'll continue to update you.

Jay

[BearcatSteve]

Hi, Jay

We're experiencing the same problem for one of our concurrently-employed (more than one personnel assignment) users, but oddly enough the buttons are enabled for one of our developers (not concurrently employed).

Did you perform any steps beyond what is outlined in the Online_W2_UG_v2.pdf?  Are you able to maintain the IT3228 record directly via PA30?

We noticed that method CHECK_KEY of class CL_HRPA_INFOTYPE_3228_US was expecting the objps field to be populated.  However, the delivered logic was not populating it (like I see in most other infotypes).  I modified this logic to use 01 for this CHECK logic if the objps value is initial.  Prior to making this change, we were unable to maintain IT3228, even via PA30.  After the change, we are only able to create new records.  Modify and Delete are not possible.

Hopefully you're having more luck than we are!

- Steve Miller

[Former Member]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for responding. Interesting about concurrent employment – we’re not using CE but maybe that is somehow a factor. I did go through the Online W2 User Guide in order to complete the configuration. And yes, we can update IT3228 via PA30. Earlier this infotype was turned off, but once I copied the screen configuration from our client 000 for module pool MP322800, it worked fine. Oddly enough if I create an IT3228 record via PA30, the paper and online icons magically become operational in ESS for the user.

I called the CIC today and escalated my open SAP message to High Priority. Hopefully I’ll get some feedback shortly. Once I do I’ll update this thread. Or hopefully someone who sees this will respond to our issue.

Thanks again.

Jay

[BearcatSteve]

Well, T588M was part of our problem....  We're now able to maintain via PA30 and the non-CE guy is able to maintain via the delivered webdynpro application.  Another odd thing we're seeing is that once he does maintain his IT3228, there are always two records valid:  1 for our company code, and one without the company code specified.

That's interesting about the existence of an IT3228 record affecting the buttons.  So, maybe we're expected to do a mass-upload of the infotype records with a default value of "paper"?  That seems unneccesary.

We have a customer message open for the unavailable buttons, too, so we'll see which one of us gets a response first.  Ours hasn't been escalated to High yet, though, so you might win that race.