Page 51 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

ESSENTIALS of Payr oll: Management and Accounting
This employee change form can be used as the source document
for new employees, as well as for each incremental change requested by
existing employees. In the latter case, enter just the information relating
to a specific request (such as a change in short-term disability, supple-

mental life insurance, or a 401(k) deduction); then have the employee
sign it, to confirm the transaction, and submit it to the payroll staff for
processing. Finally, file the completed form in the employee’s personnel
folder.

I N THE REAL WORLD

Problems with Centralized

Payroll Records

A printing company decided to conduct an industry “rollup,” where-
by it purchased a number of small regional printing plants around
the country. As a cost-saving measure, the human resources files
of the new subsidiaries were shifted to a central human resources
location for administration by a single human resources group. This
caused a problem for the payroll departments (which were retained
in each location) because they had no access to the payroll deduc-
tion information that was contained within the personnel folders.
The company considered digitizing all of the documents in these
files and making them available to authorized users over a corporate
intranet, but concluded that the risk of someone hacking into the
system and accessing personal information was too great. As a less
technologically intensive alternative, the company installed a private
fax machine in the office of each subsidiary’s payroll department so
that requested documents could be sent directly to the requesting
person’s attention with minimal risk of interception.

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