I am looking to leave my current salaried position with my company to become a consultant to the same company but on my own terms.

When talking with the owner before his own words were that it costs him about 30% in overhead to have an employee vs contractor.

Then in negotiating our reorg he is now telling me much lower numbers.

How can i found out what his federal and state payments are for me to have medical, dental, workers compensation, etc with me on payroll? An approximation of this information is fine. He is trying to tell me it is only costing him about $2500 - $5000 a year which i find very hard to believe with the comany paying 100% of my medical let alone everything else.

If I am totally off my rocker here too please let me know. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Assuming, in fact, that you would qualify as an independent contractor (which is by no means clear to me at this point), you don't have any legal right to information about how much it costs him to provide benefits. If this is a publicly-held company or corporation (i.e., not individually owned or an LLC), you can get a copy of the annual report.

What is more important when costing out your services as an IC is how much it costs YOU to replace benefits that you would be getting at a much lower cost if you were an employee.

Also assuming that you are legally an independant contractor (I am also skeptical), then you will be picking up both ends of FICA (15.3%) as self-employment tax.

"Overhead" is complicated. Some costs like medical are fixed. Other costs like FICA and worker's compensation (which you just lost) are more or less variable with salary. High wage earners tend to have a low overhead percent because the fixed costs gets spread over a lot more base salary. If your boss is talking overhead, IMO, he is blowing smoke in your face.

Your terminated so you should get a COBRA package. That will tell you what your medical cost is. Like Patty said, ignore "overhead" and look at *your* actual cost.

Not your question, but you can find an article on the classification of workers between employees and independant contractors here:

http://payroll-taxes.com/articles/art2.html