The importance of using your payroll provider for onboarding, WOTC, and ACA

What You Should Know: Many Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) companies encourage prospects to use their solution for WOTC, new hire onboarding, and even Affordable Care Act compliance services. If your current payroll provider already offers these services, however, using a different solution can be very inefficient for many reasons. Let’s take a look at some potential inefficiencies:

• Onboarding solutions provided by WOTC companies usually don’t integrate with most payroll services. If it does, it won’t transfer all of the necessary new hire information, which leads to manual input of data, possible errors, and compliance mistakes.

• Onboarding-to-payroll integrations are incredibly complex, so many clients using a separate WOTC provider for onboarding services are forced to manually add some (if not all) of the new hire onboarding information into their payroll system.

• Since payroll companies must have limited power of attorney (POA) to take responsibility for tax deposits, compliance issues can arise when the employee’s tax information does not transfer correctly into your payroll system from the separate onboarding company. When using your payroll company for both, there is no doubt that the payroll company must take responsibility for tax issues and penalties.

• Using your payroll company for onboarding allows new hires to easily complete, review, and edit many payroll-centric documents that WOTC companies aren’t privy to through an employee portal login, personal phone app, and much more

Maximizing your WOTC credits when using different software platforms and companies is difficult.

• • Outside WOTC services platforms must continually pull information from payroll companies to determine credit eligibility.

• • Data transfers between different companies increase security risks and vulnerabilities for you and create a more significant opportunity for information to fall through the cracks and cause clients to lose credits.

• • When your WOTC and payroll service are the same company, you don’t have to worry about finger-pointing or data leakage since you are dealing with one secure software platform and support team.

Affordable Care Act (ACA) tracking has critical payroll information that must be captured in real-time.

• • Using your payroll provider for ACA services means there is, once again, no need for continual data feeding back and forth between two separate companies, which eliminates the possibility of data leakage and improves your business security.

• • Since your payroll service already has a POA for your payroll taxes, that responsibility automatically extends to ACA notices, making it a streamlined provider of tax notices and payroll needs.

• • When you use the payroll service for onboarding and ACA, the new employee is automatically classified correctly from the first day, so nothing slips through the cracks.

Why complicate your already unified HR and payroll process?

Save Time and Money: Using one company and one software platform for all three critical employer functions means a single point of contact, one software platform, more WOTC savings, and fewer administrative headaches.

Here are ten essential questions to ask an outside WOTC, ACA, or onboarding service provider before making your decision:

1. 1. May I have a live login (not a demo account) to your onboarding solution so I can adequately test the onboarding process against my current solution provided by my payroll company?

1. 1. Once I have thoroughly tested the onboarding process, can I also try the onboarding systems integration to track how much new hire data imports into our payroll system?

1. 1. Suppose I receive a tax notice due to a new hire onboarding tax glitch. How do I determine whether the payroll service is responsible or the WOTC/onboarding company is reliable?

1. 1. How do you ensure that all employees are screened for WOTC?

1. 1. How often do you need WOTC data from my payroll system, and who pulls that data?

1. 1. Since payroll and WOTC are intertwined, how do you research the information requests from state taxing authorities? Do you expect my staff or my CPA firm to provide this?

1. 1. With our payroll service providing WOTC, the credit calculation is continuous and dynamic because it’s housed in the same software as our payroll. How often does your WOTC calculation update?

1. 1. With our payroll service providing WOTC, we get our annual basis 10 months following the close of the tax year. For instance, we will be billed for all 2019 credits in October 2020. Can we have the same billing cycle with you? If not, how often are we billed, and how is the billing determined?

1. 1. Because ACA tracking relies on dynamic payroll data such as eligibility dates and compensated hours, who is responsible for ensuring that bi-directional data flow is timely and accurate?

1. 1. Our payroll service currently has a POA to take responsibility for any ACA penalties from the IRS, but who would take care of these notices and penalties if we switched to your service? Also, if there are any issues with data migration between the outside ACA firm and the payroll service, how can I determine who is responsible?

In other words:

You should test out the entire flow of any software platform before making a decision. At AllianceHCM, we offer all of our prospects a free “full-access” trial period to our entire software solution suite, and you should expect the same from any outside WOTC, onboarding, or ACA provider.

Why is using AllianceHCM more beneficial?

• • We have the expertise, service, and software to handle it all.

• • We guarantee accuracy and compliance.

• • We can maximize your WOTC credits.

• • New employees are automatically classified correctly so nothing slips through the cracks when using AllianceHCM for onboarding and ACA services.

• • You’ll pay less when using AllianceHCM’s complete solution suite.

• • You only have one company to hold accountable for all your payroll, onboarding, WOTC, and ACA needs.