We are implementing Employee Self-Service, but have some concerns with address and withholding changes being made without any sort of review prior to them taking place. Lawson says there is no way to place these changes in a holding queue for approval. I know we can have email notification of address changes made through ESS, but there isn't anything for withholding changes.

Is anyone holding these transactions for review, or have some other workaround for this problem?

Tori McWhorter
I/S Business Analyst
Olathe Medical Center

Oh boy,
This brings back some bad memories. few years ago we did something similar to this by capturing the AGS call and sending it to a file. then the file was approved by someone down the line and submitted through, we used BCI but you could do that almost a dozen different ways. It was pretty messy but there is a way to take that idea and clean it up a bit.
Either way you're talking about having a good bit of mods. I don't think there is a out of the box answer though.

It really depends on what the concern is. I could be wrong, but the conern probably isn't that the information needs to be approved before it is sent into the system. My guess is that your current process is that the employee fills out the paper form and then it is entered into the system without any approval process (I could be wrong of course). If that's the case, then having the employee complete the address change or withholdings directly in Lawson is just eliminating the re-keying of the information into the system by the middle man. Another concern, especially for address changes, could be the notification of areas that need to know that address change (like a 3rd party benefit administrator for example). In that case, you could use some creative solutions with Smart Notifications, ProcessFlow, and/or Cyrstal Reports that could automatically email/print/save/etc. the address change information to the appropriate person or place.

All to often though it's that the business processes we have in place don't support the technology. And instead of reevaluating how the process can be modified/improved, we focus on how to change the technology to work with the process. If you ever find yourself saying, we have to make Lawson work this way, because it's the way we've always done this...it's probably a good opportunity to reevaluate your proccesses.

Of course, every situtation is unique and this may not apply to you.

The only concern we had was with the fact that in the states we operate in it= is mandated that state and federal witholdings match and since through ESS the employee sets each independantly they can set them to be different. That was the upside of the old paper form. one form set both. We have created a smartnotification that notifies payroll of any employee who has federal and state exemptions or marital status that don't match. We also modified the ess screen to inform the employee that the two must match and if they don't the state exemptioins will be reset to match federal.
We also have one employee who has some type of court order to that they must claim single and 0 exemptions. so we have another Smartnote that will tell if that employee ever makes a change to thier W-4.

The only concern with address was the upper lower case punctuation mess that people tend to enter. we have had one of our DBA's create some type of conversion that we run regularly to help with this.

We don't allow withholding changes thru ESS, because our understanding is the IRS requires a hard copy W-4 in the employee's file, and how do you get the employee to print the form and get it to HR?

We still use paper w-4s...but I thought the rules had changed to allow for electronic W-4s?

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? We didn't consult legal counsel, just were reading from IRS website.

A thought: How about a nightly report on whomever has set up the deductions incorrectly? Then their wrists can be slapped (figuratively speaking) by HR the next morning.

This is just a short version from an internet search on the subject basically the regulations say you can accept them electronically. This is from IRS Regs


Explanation of Revisions and Summary of Comments
1. Relationship between paper and electronic Forms W-4. A
withholding exemption certificate (Form W-4) may be in
either paper or electronic form. Therefore, an employee
will furnish a Form W-4 to the employer either on paper or
electronically. To clarify that an electronic Form W-4 has
the same status as a paper Form W-4, the final regulations
make minor revisions to 31.3402(f)(5)-1, Form and contents
of withholding exemption certificates. Further, the final
regulations appear as 31.3402(f)(5)-1©, rather than in a
separate regulations section limited to electronic forms.
EFFECTIVE DATE: These final regulations are effective January 2, 1997.

We have address changes as a PA to be entered thru Manager Self Service and a Processflow to bring it thru the HR and PR depts. Another reason for checking address changes is to make sure that TaxFactory likes the address that is entered. Our PR dept checks the address change request against TF and the USPS to ensure that it is valid before approving the PA. This saves a lot of headaches during a Payroll run.