ADP has introduced ADP SmartCompliance, a set of outsourced services to assist organizations with tax, employment and payroll compliance.

With the cloud-based unified set of services, ADP aims to help midsize and large companies better manage compliance capabilities. This outsourced services work with an organization’s existing enterprise resource planning, financial or human resources system. The system handles areas such as employment taxes, tax credits including the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, wage payments, wage garnishments, unemployment claims and W2 forms.

To make the case for the new services, ADP unveiled a new study conducted by CFO Research, in which a group of 150 senior finance executives were polled. Eighty-one percent of the senior finance executives surveyed said that monitoring tax, employment and payment-related rule changes has become more time-consuming over the past two years, and 76 percent do not have access to real-time, consolidated compliance data. The research found that 89 percent of the senior finance executives polled ranked compliance as a priority. Managing compliance has becoming increasingly difficult, however, with 73 percent of the survey respondents saying they expect the complexity of new regulations to make the task more resource-intensive over the next two years.

Nearly 55 percent said that despite those challenges and the fact that timeframes are getting compressed, they will at best have the same budget going forward as they have today.

“Those pressures to deal with these compliance changes are really significant and getting worse, and they’re being asked to do more with less,” said ADP Value Added Services President Doug Politi. “In the end, our business at ADP is to live in that complexity of compliance, but it isn’t for our clients. They want to serve food in their restaurants, do hospitality and manufacturing and whatever it is they do. Finance executives need to contribute to that long-term goal. Anything they’re doing around these complexity challenges is taking them off the ball relative to what they’re trying to accomplish. They’re being tasked to do more with less, deal with this level of complexity in compliance and, at best, just over half of them are saying they’ll keep their money flat basically to deal with these complexity challenges. "

“We also found that even when they felt they were doing a good job relative to staying up with the compliance changes, fines and penalties are viewed as the cost of doing business,” he added. “A third had paid some fine or penalty in the last year, and the average of those had paid almost six and a half penalties over the course of the last 12 months. That compliance and penalty risk is real, and even though they’re doing a good job, they’re still paying fines and penalties.”

For more information, visit www.adp.com/smartcompliance.