International Payroll Compliance: Keeping Track of Legal Changes
In our previous discussion, we addressed the importance of companies maintaining a degree of control over compliance when outsourcing payroll functions. This should be straight enough: all one needs to do is to sign up to the appropriate newsletters, right?
Well, actually… it may not be quite that straight forward.
While it is factually correct that there exists a plethora of highly informative newsletters, most of them have drawbacks:
• they are paid subscriptions,
• they are in the local language,
• or, more usually, both.
This is typically not a problem for domestic payroll teams or larger teams within BPO organisations or SSCs that have the necessary language skills. These teams usually are relatively large and cover a limited number of countries. This allows for language coverage of the supported countries.
The real challenge is for small international payroll teams. Imagine a team of six managing payroll for over 30 countries in the EMEA region, which includes more than 20 languages. It is unlikely that such a team can cover all these languages.
One option is to subscribe to a multitude of newsletters for each supported countries and translate them using an online translating tool. After all, the payroll team does not need an in-depth understanding of all the subtleties of every regulatory change, but only to be aware of the change in order to make sure that it is implemented. This option has the drawback of being time consuming: the more countries covered by a single payroll team member, the more time it requires.
The good news is that there is a number of websites that offer online updates or newsletters. The best part of it? Some of them are even free of charge! Here are some examples of helpful websites that will speed up research considerably:
• PwC’s Global Employment Tax Newsletter: the latest edition was released in February
• E&Y’s Tax Alerts
• KPMG’s Global Withholding Taxes Guide
• Mazars’ Tax & Payroll Newsletter for Central and Eastern Europe
• WERC’s News for mobile employees (expatriates/inpatriates)
While these resources are not exhaustive, they represent a first step towards maintaining a degree of control over compliance when outsourcing payroll functions.