The expert view Steve Cassidy
If there is a part of most businesses where IT assumptions about security break down, it’s inside the accounts department. Bookkeepers and company officers have obligations to make payroll work: this is one case where the IT person isn’t the one who is most concerned and responsible for security.
It’s also a field where cloud-like services have been evident for decades. Many banks have long provided “automated payroll” as a service for smaller businesses, including the printing of payslips. Using new technologies to do this dull, but vital, work adds a frisson of modernity, without necessarily making things better for all four participants in the process. Yes, four: the boss, the worker, the developer and the government.
Especially when it comes to wages for the lower end of the economy, the government is a lot more active than may seem obvious to the classic middle-class skilled coder. Cheap jobs can be part-time or short in duration – in which case the repository of information on payslips and PAYE information is the recipient of the wages, not the distant cloud data centre or the funky startup. Also be aware of the assumption that such workers will be printing off such slips at home, or storing them anywhere safe. Longer term, when HMRC comes digging, that could cause problems for both the employer and the employee.
Some of these services may also find themselves drawn into unexpected issues, such as the carpetbagger problem, where an entrepreneur sets up a bunch of relationships, issues payment cards, and then absconds. There’s also the problem of what to do when HMRC decides to play hardball, commonly achieved by an upfront accusation of money laundering. This leads to a financial freeze, with no money moving around the business at all: in this unhappy state, how can the various parties establish that the automatic salary payment system has honoured the legal block?
It’s early days, and this is a very diverse field – after all, for some it’s absolutely not early days, and for others the flexibility may produce more issues than savings. You only have to spend some time trying to debug company payment systems to see that this is a field that wrings every last drop of diversity and pig-headedness out of what ought to be a simple and straightforward operation.
What can you take from this? Simple: when choosing a payroll technology, listen very carefully to those who are affected, as much to those who are merely involved.