Who to turn to - and why - when payroll problems become apparent
First things first, if you suspect there's problems in your payroll history don't dwell on it. At Payroll Intelligence we say the same thing to all of our clients: "everyone gets their turn" when it comes to treating these issues. Remember, the leading payroll experts with the best technology messed this up. These people were the Dan Carters of payroll and (with the greatest of respect) the other 99% of employers haven't got those leading payroll experts on their team. Something was bound to slip past you eventually, especially if your business had employment circumstances which made it harder to meet the minimum entitlements set out by the Holidays Act 2003.
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Like most things in life, early diagnosis is the smartest bet: maybe you want to check a small group of high risk employees and so today you're looking for a vendor to do that. We encourage all employers to "Be Audit Ready". But maybe you missed that early chance and now your hand has been forced with an organisational-wide undertaking. In either situation, if your organisation is investigating/fixing a breach of minimum entitlements set out by law then you need to think very carefully about who you choose to do this.​​
Your Shortlist.​​
Big consultancy firm
The process of resolving these issues is extremely complex, that's why the earliest organisations you've seen in the media spent millions of dollars on it with the usual big firms, that's before they actually repaid any of their employees! They dealt with big consultancy firms who threw warm bodies and early technology at the task, because that was pretty much their only option. By all means, choose one if you're an organisation with that budget. They'll have the experience; most of the teams who carried out this work in the late 2010s and early 2020s haven't been dismantled yet.
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Your external legal counsel
They would be the best fit for a task like this - after all, it's the Holidays Act: it's interpreting the law. But here's why you won't end up getting this work completed by them: go and ask your Legal team how they feel about staring at screens of numbers for days or weeks. We know most employment lawyers across the country and very few of them claim/aspire to be mathematicians. They're most likely to just integrate Payroll Intelligence (or someone like us) into the conversation.
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Payroll Intelligence
We fit in the competency gap between your legal and accounting teams. We specialise in the Holidays Act enough to know the law back to front (probably better than your legal team, because frankly they've got better things to be across) and can meet the demanding mathematical challenges that most people would associate with accountants. Payroll Intelligence has the experience paired with cutting edge technology to successfully complete this process for as many or as few employees as you require. If that needs to be reviewed by someone as high up as the Labour Inspectorate, our clients have the confidence that our work has successfully passed those checks in the past.
Your Accountant
For many years the Accountants were also an option for solving these issues. After all, only the top 1% of employers have budget for a big consultancy firm, and the Accountants are typically the go-to numbers experts for everyone else. But most Accountants now are shying away from this task. They know that doing your GST (or your weekly payroll) is very different to reverse engineering the Holidays Act and having it stand up under increasing audit scrutiny. What chance does an Accountant have in tackling an employment law so complex, that the qualified Employment Law specialists dislike it? No Accounting organisation wants their fingerprints on a liability topic that they have less than 100% confidence in tackling.
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Your payroll team*
They don't actually make the shortlist, but we simply listed them here to let readers know they hadn't been overlooked. No conscientious employer would engage the organisation whose technology/expertise was complicit in potentially underpaying staff, to then check their own flawed execution. It boils down to a simple matter of objectivity: if this party believed things were correct at the time of payment, what do you think they will conclude when asked to review those transactions?
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Working with Payroll Intelligence.
​We have these projects down to a fine art. Big or small projects, the initial challenge will likely be extracting and preparing your historical data for re-assessment. Once we overcome that initial hurdle, the re-assessments process follows a rigorous feedback loop which liaises with stakeholders on key decisions and regularly updating progress. Clients appreciate this workflow because it’s efficient on everyone’s time. There’s no point in dragging in valuable hours unnecessarily – get the necessary parties together only when we are at a junction requiring a swift resolution.
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Payroll Intelligence can exercise our knowledge of the legislation to achieve the best outcome for our clients. The final reporting can be interrogated by whomever needs to, and any scenario-testing is a concise exercise of “what if”. Those who see these projects over and over again – legal and accounting – tell us that we can do things in a heartbeat which would take other people weeks to achieve, which of course keeps a lid on the damage to the client's bank balance. It all culminates into outcomes that help employers get on with business swiftly with minimal disruption.
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Quite often all roads lead to Payroll Intelligence. A legal or accounting team will bring us in because we slot in seamlessly to the wider conversation, but Payroll Intelligence isn't always first to arrive on the scene; sometimes we are brought in because the employer's trusted circle has doubts over who was originally chosen to do the job. Importantly, it's not just the 'higher ups' who will review this work - your employees have a vested interest in knowing this was done right. In fact when an employee gets paid their money for a remediation executed by their employer, they will often bring it to Payroll Intelligence to check it was actually done correctly. If you are procuring this project for your organisation, you need to know that there will be multiple sets of eyes on any outcomes. How confident will you be when it's under the scrutiny of everyone from legal to Labour Inspectors, from employees to experts, from accountants to A.I.?
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Conclusion.
Whether an employer has discovered a problem or simply wants to stay in front of that possibility, Payroll Intelligence is here to help. No matter the context of your project, your scale, what state your data is in or the problems you are worried about, we have seen it all before. We know from the Solicitors and Accountants that we work with, that our process is finely tuned for success. We have a track record of working alongside teams to achieve success with our unique combination of technology and expertise.