Payroll professionals should make sure that their IT infrastructure is secure enough. For example, it should no longer be acceptable to process payroll data in Excel spreadsheets and send the data around via email.
The best way to protect your information from cybercriminals is to adopt a data breach response plan – the payroll version of an incident response plan. These plans should categorize levels of severity and layout processes for remediation.
Human Error
Payroll departments worldwide collect and process susceptible data containing personal financial information. Payroll security is now a top priority due to the increasing cybercrime and businesses falling prey to attacks of all sizes. Especially for multinationals, the stakes are high: employee data breaches can severely impact global operations.
Global payroll systems contain confidential personal information, such as home addresses, bank account details, salary data, company ID numbers, and social security information. This makes it a desirable target for cybercriminals. The resulting data breach could lead to hefty fines, jail time, and damage to the business’s reputation.
Despite best intentions, human error is an inevitable aspect of payroll processing. This is especially true for global teams whose work is often done remotely and may need help with language barriers or cultural differences that can cause misunderstandings. Incorrect information can cause payment delays, financial loss, and non-compliance with tax and labor rules. It can also leave employees frustrated and dissatisfied with their employer.
To prevent human error, it’s essential to have a solid digital platform cyber security that enables only authorized payroll and HR professionals to interact with confidential payroll data. This can be achieved through a system that restricts data transfer from computer to computer and records when and why these changes were made.
Cloud Computing
Payroll data must be handled carefully to protect sensitive employee information. Failure to do so can expose the company to costly fines for privacy breaches. Payroll data is also a valuable target for cybercriminals, so it’s essential to implement high-level security measures to prevent unauthorized access.
Global payroll trends are often a complex process for organizations. As a result, it’s easy for payroll data to get siloed across different systems, spreadsheets, and locations. Finance managers may need to retrieve payroll data from various sources, standardize it, and convert currency – which can be time-consuming.
Regulatory changes can occur in any country in which your business operates, impacting compliance and payroll processes. For example, labor regulations, tax laws, and reporting requirements can change quickly and must be monitored to ensure your organization remains compliant. Best practices suggest having a formalized compliance program that monitors these changes and ensures that new or changed legislation is identified, assessed for cross-functional impacts, and addressed accordingly.
Unlike on-premise software, cloud providers constantly update their platforms and servers with the latest technology. In addition, they typically employ a full-time staff of IT professionals specializing in digital/network security. Utilizing a reliable cloud provider reduces the chances of security breaches and improves the integrity and reliability of data. Moreover, a trustworthy cloud provider has redundancy embedded in their platform, safeguarding against hardware failures and hacker attacks.
Regulatory Changes
A data breach increases the possibility of financial loss while endangering a company’s reputation and brand image. This is especially true if the breach involves private information that might be used to identify a person, such as social security numbers and addresses. Employees trust their employers with this information and expect it to be kept securely.
The good news is that data breaches can be prevented with the proper technology and procedures. It’s no longer acceptable to process payroll-related data in Excel sheets or via email, and storing sensitive information on local hard drives isn’t the safest option. Instead, a secure cloud computing environment and system of checks and balances will reduce internal vulnerability to malicious attacks on your sensitive payroll data.
Payroll-specific data typically falls under strict standards of privacy and security laws, so global payroll teams must ensure that their policies are up to date with the latest regulations.
In addition to implementing technology and processes, a robust security framework requires employees to be well-trained and on the lookout for unauthorized access to payroll data. Employees should be trained in data encryption, password protection, two-factor authentication, and other best practices.
Third-Party Vendors
As businesses expand their workforce globally, they often partner with third-party providers for payroll-related services. These third-party vendors can include everything from local tax and benefits specialists to global payroll processors. This approach to global payroll management allows companies to leverage expertise in smaller markets where they might not have a presence while also keeping the cost of international hiring down.
However, working with multiple payroll partners introduces additional risks to data security. Each entity handles payroll information differently, and there are no guarantees that each will adhere to strict security standards. If one of these vendors falls short of their compliance obligations, it can affect all the companies that work with them.
To mitigate this risk, the first step for any business should be to move away from legacy technology prone to security breaches and into a secure cloud environment. This will help to reduce the risk of a data breach significantly.
Another important measure is to limit the amount of personal employee data collected, processed, and stored. This will also minimize the risk of a privacy violation. Additionally, as soon as the legal period for keeping records expires, all that information should be deleted from systems and disposed of securely.
