Udemy for Business withholding tax for September earnings

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Udemy for Business withholding tax for September earnings

Lili
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi everyone,

 

Initial Udemy for Business earnings calculations for September have completed and are in the process of posting to instructor revenue reports. However, secondary effects to the October 6 site instability caused a delay in calculating the exact withholding tax for each instructor. As a result, your withholding estimate for September currently includes the maximum possible withholding for your Udemy for Business earnings.

 

The updated withholding calculation will be performed early next week. Most instructors who have tax withheld from their Udemy for Business earnings will see the expected tax decrease at that point. Instructors who do not have tax withheld from their Udemy for Business earnings will see no change.


We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. If you have any questions, please ask them here or reach out to instructorsupport@udemy.com.

11 Comments
CarlosDeLeon
Trailblazer Trailblazer
Trailblazer

@Lili,

 

I don't see a problem with the fact that the final numbers will be delayed, but I do think Udemy really neds to fix and stabilize all the processes related to the UFB, once and for all.

 

Why did you guys need to wait until instructors reported that the tax numbers were incorrect, to tell us about it?

 

Why did the system post partial information to the instructors' dashboards again?

 

That was supposedly fixed in previous months, and @KatieBent stated that information was only going to be posted once it was final, but it seems we went one step backwards this month.

 

Do you understand how difficult it can be for instructors to trust in the UFB numbers Udemy reports, and our earnings, when we are completely blind, and in addition to that we see so many issues with the process?

 

I'm sure UFB is an important source of income for Udemy, so, assigning the necessary resources to fix the UFB processes once and for all should be a priority.

Lili
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @CarlosDeLeon -

 

We know that this has been a bumpy road, and while we have been continuing to improve this year, we know we still have a long way to go.

 

It wasn’t our intention to wait until this issue was noticed to communicate it out to instructors. We communicated as soon as we could, which regrettably was after the numbers were posted. This came down to an unfortunate timing issue where the affected tasks happened while the US-based communication team was offline. 

 

Regarding the concern of partial information, we wanted to prioritize posting the pre-tax earnings on our committed timeline, even if it meant the tax withholding amounts would need to be updated later. This was particularly pertinent given the number of instructors who don’t see withholding on their earnings and are thus unaffected.

 

The points about trust are well-taken and we will continue to share with the broader team. We will be evaluating this incident to look for further process improvements.

 

Thank you for your candid feedback on this.

 

- Lili, Udemy Community Manager

CarlosDeLeon
Trailblazer Trailblazer
Trailblazer

Thanks, Lili.

KatieBent
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey @CarlosDeLeon ,

 

I just wanted to echo Lili's sentiment here -- we've been doing our best to make this smoother over the course of the year, and we've made some progress, but we know there's still a lot more work to do on that front. After last month's smooth reporting, you're totally right that this month was a step back.

 

We appreciate your point about the correlation between the predictability of the process and your faith in the end result. We'll keep pushing to increase predictability (and therefore reaffirm trust) in the reporting process.

CarlosDeLeon
Trailblazer Trailblazer
Trailblazer

Thanks, Katie.

SivakamiS2017
Specialist Specialist
Specialist

When will this be done ?

Lili
Community Manager
Community Manager

@SivakamiS2017 - Apologies for the delay. We know we initially said that this would be addressed early this week, but our engineers are still working on the update. Currently, we are on track to have this resolved by the end of the week. 

SivakamiS2017
Specialist Specialist
Specialist

It just keeps getting further and further delayed, Lili. It's about time it got fixed for good.

Lili
Community Manager
Community Manager

@SivakamiS2017 - the update was released earlier this morning. Please check again. Thanks!

SivakamiS2017
Specialist Specialist
Specialist

Thanks. I just checked and it has !

SegunOlawuyi
Researcher
Researcher

Yes, it has