3 Steps to Uncomplicated Compliance Management
Why is compliance management complicated? Obligations vary depending on local, state and federal levels. New legislation proposals and rollouts make for a confusing mess of rules and guidelines to sort through.
According to a report by the Ponemon Institute, organizations spend $5.47 million on compliance compared to an average of $14.82 million for non-compliance. With almost triple the amount of expense at stake, it’s important to have a system of tools in place to help monitor compliance and prove how your company is managing it. We have steps to help you uncomplicate the process.
Step One: understanding compliance.
Common compliance issues to monitor:
- HR compliance. Employers must follow employment laws, including at the local, state and federal levels. Some common topics within HR compliance include benefits and Affordable Care Act (ACA), recruitment and hiring, required trainings (like sexual harassment education) and employee classification (exempt vs. non-exempt) compliance.
- Federal wage and hour laws are a hot topic in the cleaning and security industries, all of which basically boil down to ensuring you’re calculating wages (including overtime) accurately. This includes payroll tax withholdings, depositing tax liabilities and filing returns. Some common topics related to payroll compliance include the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA), the Equal Pay Act (EPA), Federal Insurance Contributions Acts (FICA) and more.
- Tax withholding updates. Multi-state and local tax changes can be tricky to stay on top of, but they play a big role in your company’s profitability.
Step two: using workforce management software to stay compliant.
There are advantages of using a workforce management solution to stay compliant.
- Time and attendance (including punch times): software can track employee time worked, as well as meals and breaks —paid and unpaid. With the right setup of notifications, managers should be alerted if employees forget to punch back in to work and be able to minimize premium payments.
- Scheduling: software can support scheduling compliance needs, like predictability of pay, the right for employees to decline scheduling changes and the choice of additional work hours when available (among others).
- Regulation monitoring: While not everyone does this, TEAM is committed to ensure our software solutions meet the ever-changing compliance needs of our customers. So, we track HR, tax and payroll compliance updates constantly and post about them on our learning center. But remember, it’s important to do your research and consult your legal and tax advisors with specific questions or concerns.
- Reporting: Quick, easy-to-use tools that can pull real-time information are essential to compliance.
Step three: ask questions along the way.
Questions to ask your software provider:
- What can you do to help my business show compliance? At TEAM, we create cool, flexible tools that enable your company to be compliant based on your current company structure. (We don’t enforce compliance and we can’t offer you legal advice.) Our software is designed to give you the information you need to show that you’re in compliance with the latest regulatory needs based on where your business is based. Think: meal and rest breaks, pay-to-the-minute and vaccine tracking (to name a few).
- Do you integrate with third-party compliance solutions? TEAM doesn’t enforce compliance, and we can’t offer you legal advice. But, we’ve built API integrations with people who do. Our solutions help manage your employee, operations and payroll information, and with easy integrations, your tax processing partners can pull the information they need to manage and prove you’re compliant. Meaning: less work, headache and risk of fines for you.
