Compliance Issues Every HR Professional Needs to Know

All businesses must follow specific rules, regulations, and laws to avoid penalties and legal complications,. To ensure that the firm satisfies its legal requirements, HR must take a proactive approach. This includes not only meeting the employees’ health and safety needs, but also ensuring that they are receiving their statutory and contractual workplace rights.

The rights include preventing workplace discrimination, adhering to proper recruitment standards, and ensuring that employees are paid fairly. As a result, HR compliance must stay on top of any changes in employment legislation, such as gender pay reporting or the hiring of foreign workers.

Being an HR professional is a demanding job. Human resource difficulties are what make or break a corporation. And one business-critical HR issue is deciding how the company meets its responsibilities and resolve compliance difficulties. Here are the most common challenges HR faces today:

Identify laws and compliance standards to be applied

Companies will not be able to comply with laws or regulations if they do not understand and identify their legal responsibilities. Employer obligations are governed by a plethora of complex rules and regulations. Payroll, employment taxes, the Skills Development Levy (SDL), termination pay, and unemployment claims can be complicated, making it problematic for businesses. And especially during COVID, companies have faced difficulties in how to leverage government relief programs, how to process employment tax deferrals and calculate tax credit eligibility.

Solution: Identifying and documenting significant compliance issues, and utilizing HR and legal expertise. Companies can overcome these obstacles by using systematic activities to detect compliance requirements and associated risk of noncompliance, such as:

1. Make a list of all areas of risk for workforce compliance. Begin by addressing known obligations related to payroll, taxes, tax credits and incentives, unemployment, health and safety, leave categories, record keeping, and privacy related issues.
2. Rely on the payroll and employment-related compliance organizations you work with to keep an eye on changes in legislation or guidelines and to recommend best practices for your company to apply.

As the speed of legal change and compliance requirements accelerates, addressing this difficulty will become increasingly important.

Effectively apply the necessary compliance rules

Multiple stakeholders, including different departments inside the company (HR and finance), employees, and outside organizations, are frequently involved when it comes to employer obligations under local legislation. This problem is exacerbated by the necessity to securely handle sensitive data among those stakeholders and supporting systems in order to collect and evaluate compliance data in a timely manner.

Solution: Compile a list of the people, procedures, and systems that are required for compliance.

1. Detail the compliance process and identify any broken or fragmented processes.
2. Identify personnel and departments involved in supporting these activities on an annual or regular basis.
3. Establish actions that must be completed on an annual or regular basis.
4. Keep track of system touchpoints to ensure data security and correct process flow.

Automating routine tasks and providing better process transparency to all stakeholders is one way to help solve coordinating and connecting people, processes, and systems. Having a lot of manual procedures and stand-alone systems increases time, effort, and money on maintaining and updating them. Tasks and tools that don’t drive the business forward can stifle strategic enhancements. They may also lead to a negative employee experience, not only for your compliance team, but for the entire organization, putting you on the back foot when it comes to recruitment and retaining staff.

Managing compliance manually can result in financial penalties, government audits, and summary judgements due to human error, bottlenecks, and delays. To solve these problems, you’ll need to devote even more time and resources to investigating and resolving compliance issues.

Reporting to the right government agencies and organizations

When it comes to reporting to the proper agencies in support of their employment-related compliance, companies benefit from significant understanding and experience. Companies may lose much of their important knowledge and expertise as a result of staffing layoffs in reaction to the economic crisis, as well as personnel turnover, at a time when they need it most.

Solution: Determine knowledge gaps and available resources.

1. Companies should assess their existing internal compliance knowledge and identify gaps to determine risks that need to be addressed.
2. Establish initiatives to assure adequate current and long-term coverage, which can include external expertise, automating processes, and ensuring the sharing and transfer of internal knowledge.

Staying Ahead of the Game

Compliance can be a minefield but with KRIS HR Document Management System, companies can not only improve compliance management but also get better visibility across their whole HR landscape. To maintain regulatory compliance and uniformity, the ability to produce forms and documents based on predefined templates is available along with audit trails to monitor and report on internal controls and processes. With the correct strategy and tools, businesses can stay on top of their grame and get fresh insights to improve business performance.