Opinion
Mind Your Payroll Controls
Companies change their payroll processing function with great regularity. A newly founded organization starts with manual payroll processing to handle a small number of employees, and then typically switches to an outsourced approach once a few dozen people are on the payroll. Then, when the employee count becomes quite high, it becomes less expensive to take the processing function back in-house.
The trouble is that the accounting staff tends to forget to update the controls accompanying these systems, resulting in burdensome controls from an old system being imposed on the new system, which may require entirely different controls.