Company Profile

Founded in 1917, this BSI client is a designer and manufacturer of specialty trucks, military vehicles, truck bodies, airport fire apparatus and access equipment. They have approximately 15,000 employees in the U.S. and operate in 42 states. A global company trading on the NYSE, this client has been recognized for the past five years as being “One of the World’s Most Ethical Companies®” by Ethisphere.

Challenge

In the past, this organization had many issues with assigning the correct taxes for new employees, especially in states with complex local taxes, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. They needed to find a solution to help automate new employee onboarding and the entire W-4 process.

Specifically, these were some of the challenges:

• Administering the Form W-4 process was becoming increasingly difficult, as the company grew. Incorrect payroll withholding tax assignments resulted in many W-2Cs issued at year-end. These additional administrative tasks resulted in over 60 hours of work per year.
• The staff spent over 1,400 hours each year researching, reviewing, validating and setting up payroll tax profiles for new employees. Despite this, there were many inaccuracies in their payroll tax assignments.
• The staff also spent more than 220 hours annually updating payroll tax profiles for approximately 2,700 existing employees who changed residences or work locations.

Solution

This company automated their payroll tax onboarding and Form W-4 administration process using BSI’s TaxProfileFactory solution and saw a return on their investment in the first year. TaxProfileFactory helped eliminate the manual work the company’s staff did in researching, validating, updating and setting up payroll tax profiles for new and existing employees. Since the client had an integration between their payroll system and TaxProfileFactory, new and updated payroll tax profiles were delivered back to the payroll system in real-time.

Furthermore, TaxProfileFactory is automatically updated by BSI, thereby eliminating the work involved for the company’s staff in monitoring and managing any new W-4-related changes in the approximately 5,000 Federal, State and Local authorities across the United States.

TaxProfileFactory also automated the Form W-4 process for the client’s payroll team. The robust solution delivered and administered approximately 165 pre-populated W-4 forms, including military, resident, non-resident alien, and many others. Through a self-service, single-sign-on portal employees were able to see the actual Form W-4 in a PDF format.

Finally, by using TaxProfileFactory, the client was able to dramatically decrease year-end Form W-2 corrections, along with potential fines to the tax authorities.