Human resource departments play a large role in coordinating paperwork and all that needs to get done during tax season. Not only are HR professionals coordinating employee paperwork and collaborating with accounting departments, but they’re a large part of keeping everything streamlined, organized, and moving smoothly.
It’s no secret that tax season equals busy season. It’s more important during this time than ever to ensure human resource managers and their teams have the right tools at their disposal to get things done quickly, easily, and correctly. While utilizing the right virtual meeting software, CRM software, and employee management and payroll software is essential, incorporating electronic signatures into your HR department can be the key to transforming operations not only during tax season but all year long. Below, we’ll take a look at how HR departments are streamlining things this tax season with electronic signatures and give you some bonus insight into how this solution can help throughout the other months.
Reliable Security and Compliance
When it comes to IRS and tax paperwork, nothing is more important than maintaining security and meeting compliance requirements. Tax documents often include sensitive and personal identifying information (PII). Additionally, the IRS has expectations that various compliance efforts are met, such as knowledge-based authentication (KBA), and that ESIGN and UETA regulations are met.
Because more and more businesses are now taking advantage of the IRS allowing e-filing and electronic form submission, it’s imperative that compliance-ready and capable solutions such as Foxit eSign are used. Our electronic signature solution helps ensure the digital forms and documents collected by HR are compliant with regulatory requirements by the IRS, including with KBA capability. Plus, with features such as intuitive visibility controls that allow managers to limit who views and access documents and detailed audit trails tracking the information on all movements of each document, human resources and employees can rest-assured that everything is secure throughout the entire process.
Streamline Paperwork Completion
A lot of paperwork flows through the hands of a human resources department – especially during tax season. Various forms are needed by accounting departments and employees to ensure everything is squared away for proper tax filing – HR departments often play large roles in coordinating the completion of these forms and documents. By utilizing electronic signature software, human resource departments can easily coordinate obtaining W4 or employee withholding forms, retirement forms, tax credit forms, and more completed quickly and in a timely manner by employees.
Electronic signatures allow HR departments to utilize features such as bulk sending to send documents for mass signature all at once, thus saving time for all parties involved. Additionally, common errors can be avoided in form completion by indicating where signatures and data completion is required and by making required fields mandatory. Features like these make sending and signing a quicker and less complicated process for employees, HR, and accounting departments.
Assist with Timely IRS Submission
Proper tax filing incorporates a series of deadlines and dates throughout the year that must be met in order to avoid tax penalties and interest from accruing. During tax season, these deadlines can get much tighter. Human resource professionals can be the account department’s best friend by ensuring the paperwork they need is ready to go when they need it.
The IRS has made electronic filing available for most forms needed, paving the way for accounting departments and businesses to ensure paperwork can be filed on time and from practically anywhere. But because many of these forms still require data completion and signing, utilized a dedicated electronic signature can ensure everything is done quickly, accurately, and in a secure and legally-binding manner. HR employees can help meet and support deadlines by assisting with the timely coordination of tax paperwork by employees.
Keep Things More Organized
Organization is key when it comes to tax filing; knowing where all documents are and having the ability to access them quickly can make all the difference between a timely filing and being late. It’s time for HR departments to say goodbye to traditional filing and hello to digital document and electronic signatures.
By utilizing electronic signature solutions, such as Foxit eSign, HR departments can easily store and label completed paperwork for access and use later. Additionally, if there is a preferred cloud storage system in use such as Google Drive or Dropbox, completed documents can be automatically uploaded for secure storage. Automatic document downloads can also be coordinated to company local SFTPS servers for storage.
Get More Done All Year with Electronic Signatures
While the aforementioned benefits can provide monumental advantages to HR departments, employees, accounting, and businesses alike during tax season, electronic signatures really are a year round efficiency tool that shouldn’t be overlooked. Here’s how some of our biggest HR clients are utilizing Foxit eSign 12 months out of the year to maximize their processes:
- Better Compliance and Security: By implementing electronic signatures into HR workflows, team members can more easily and effectively control document security and access, meet legal and industry compliance regulations (such as HIPAA compliance), and be prepared for yearly audits.
- Time Reduction: Not only can electronic signatures ensure that you obtain document signatures from employees faster and from practically any location or device, but they can help prevent slowdowns caused by missing or incorrect information when you use features such as mandatory fields.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Electronic signatures usage enables simple and fast collaboration between HR, Payroll, and employees on efforts involving updated W-2 forms, direct deposit updates, bonuses, wage adjustments, and more. eSigning enables allows departments to sign off on approvals, reminders to be sent to employees for document completion, and for information to be collected faster than ever.
- Benefits Planning: With eSigning features, you can email documents directly to employees for completion, upload completed documents to company file servers or cloud servers, allow attachments (such as drivers licenses, pay stubs, social security cards, etc.) to be added to signed documents by employees, and quickly and securely collect and send paperwork to insurers and other necessary benefits vendors.
- Improved Employee Experiences: By implementing technological solutions, such as electronic signatures, that can reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to complete things like HR paperwork, employees will not only feel more empowered but will also feel more in control over the personal aspects that impact them the most.
