What Is a WOTC Survey and Do You Have to Fill It Out?

A WOTC survey is the short screening questionnaire a new employer asks you to complete so it can find out whether hiring you qualifies the company for the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit. Filling it out is voluntary. An employer cannot use your refusal to answer as a reason to turn you down, rescind an offer, or treat you differently on the job, and applicants must be told that no negative consequences follow from declining.¹

What the Survey Actually Is

Most people meet the WOTC survey inside an online onboarding portal, sometimes as paper handed out at orientation. Under the hood it is one specific IRS document, Form 8850 (Pre-Screening Notice and Certification Request), usually paired with a Department of Labor form the employer fills out afterward (ETA Form 9061, or ETA Form 9062 if an agency has already pre-certified you).²

Form 8850 collects your name, Social Security number, and address, then walks you through a series of yes-or-no questions about your recent history: whether you have received certain government benefits, whether you have served in the military, how long you have been unemployed, whether you live in specific designated areas, and similar circumstances. You sign at the bottom to confirm the answers are accurate. The form is meant to be filled out on or before the day the job offer is made, not after you have already started.³ Electronic and ink signatures are both accepted.⁴

Do You Have to Fill It Out?

No. Participation is voluntary for every applicant and every new hire, and an employer cannot use a refusal to complete the questionnaire as the basis for an adverse hiring decision.¹ You may leave the form blank, skip individual questions, or simply not submit it. The company loses only the chance to claim a tax credit; you keep the job on the same terms.

If you do fill it out, answer honestly. You are signing under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate, and the answers will be verified by a state agency against government records before the employer receives anything. Guessing or exaggerating to “help” the employer creates a paperwork problem for you, not a bigger credit.

Why Employers Ask

The Work Opportunity Tax Credit is a federal program that rewards businesses for hiring people who face barriers to employment. When a hire qualifies, the employer can claim a credit that ranges from $1,200 to $9,600 per employee, depending on which group the worker falls into and how many hours they work in the first year. The credit is currently authorized for workers who begin a job on or before December 31, 2025; anything beyond that date depends on new legislation from Congress.⁵

This is why the questionnaire arrives at the very beginning of employment rather than later. The employer needs your signed answers before the offer date to preserve its ability to claim the credit, and it has a tight window after your start date to file the paperwork with the state.

What the Questions Are Trying to Identify

Federal law lists ten “target groups.” A new hire has to fit at least one of them for the employer to claim any credit.⁶ The yes-or-no questions on Form 8850 are designed to flag whether any of these apply to you:

Qualified veterans, with separate categories for veterans whose families received SNAP, veterans with a service-connected disability, and veterans who have been unemployed for a period of weeks or months before the hire date.⁷
Recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), with a separate, higher-value category for long-term recipients.⁷
SNAP (food stamp) recipients aged 18 through 39 whose families received benefits during the six months before hire.⁷
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients who received benefits in the 60 days before hire.⁶
Designated community residents aged 18 to 39 who live in a federally designated empowerment zone or rural renewal county.³
Qualified ex-felons hired within one year of conviction or release from prison for that felony.⁷
Vocational rehabilitation referrals: people with a disability that is a substantial barrier to employment, referred by a state-approved rehabilitation agency, a Ticket to Work employment network, or the VA.⁷
Summer youth employees aged 16 or 17 working between May 1 and September 15 who live in an empowerment zone.⁶
Long-term unemployment recipients: people who have been unemployed for 27 or more consecutive weeks and received unemployment compensation during some or all of that time.⁶

If none of the questions match your circumstances, the survey produces no credit and nothing further happens. That is by far the most common outcome.

Two Situations Where the Credit Cannot Be Claimed Anyway

Two boundaries on the program are worth knowing, because they mean the questionnaire is essentially moot in these cases. First, an employer cannot claim the credit for rehiring someone who worked for the company at any prior time. Second, the credit is not available for hiring a close family member of the owner (for a corporation, a relative of anyone owning more than 50 percent of the stock; for other business types, a relative of anyone holding more than 50 percent of the capital or profits interest).⁶ If either applies to you, the survey has no purpose.

What Happens to Your Answers

The information on Form 8850 is protected under the IRS confidentiality provision at 26 U.S.C. § 6103, and the form itself says so on its face. Because the questionnaire can reveal disability-related information, the EEOC has stated that employers who collect it must handle the responses in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act’s confidentiality requirements.¹

In practice, that means WOTC forms should be kept separate from your regular personnel file, hiring managers should not be reviewing them during interviews or evaluations, and the data should be used only to administer and claim the tax credit. If a hiring manager is quizzing you about your answers or the form is being handed around the interview panel, that is not how the program is supposed to work.

What the Employer Does After You Sign

Once you complete Form 8850, the employer has 28 calendar days from your start date to send it, along with ETA Form 9061 or 9062, to the State Workforce Agency in the state where you work. Missing that window generally means the employer loses the credit for that hire.² The State Workforce Agency then checks the answers against government records and either certifies you as belonging to a target group or denies the request. You typically will not hear anything about the outcome; the certification goes to the employer, who uses it to claim the credit on its federal tax return.

Nothing about that back-end process changes your pay, your benefits, your job duties, or your tax return. The WOTC is entirely the employer’s credit. Your only role is deciding whether to answer the questions and, if you do, answering them accurately.

1
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Commission Opinion Letter Federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit Form 8850
2
U.S. Department of Labor. How to File a WOTC Certification Request
3
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 8850
4
Employment and Training Administration. Updated Work Opportunity Tax Credit Procedural Guidance Change 1
5
Internal Revenue Service. Work Opportunity Tax Credit
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 51 Amount of Credit
7
U.S. Department of Labor. WOTC Eligibility Desk Aid