Conquering Compliance: How Information Management Eliminates Risk in Human Resources

Human resources compliance involves countless regulations around employee privacy, federal audits, and record retention for potential litigation. Navigating this regulatory maze is a demanding task that can easily result in thousands of pages of information to track, archive, store, and, when needed – retrieve. This level of information is impossible to manage without a proper system in place reliably, but there are strategies and solutions. Below, we’ll cover how intelligent information management solutions can help you conquer compliance by simplifying audits, ensuring employee privacy, and preparing for litigation to eliminate risk and easily navigate challenging times.

Simplify Audits

Human Resources departments are subject to several audits from federal regulators, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and The Internal Revenue Service (IRS). These audits are primarily for I-9 employment verification forms that provide proof of eligibility for employment in the U.S. and for W-4 tax forms to ensure compliance with employee tax withholdings. I-9s must be retained for one year after employment ends, and W-4 forms must be retained for 4 years after they are filed. Failure to retain these forms can come with strict fines and penalties, such as a maximum $2,789 violation for failing to provide an I-9 in an audit. 

By capturing and indexing these records with highly accurate OCR or, better yet, having them digitally completed and archived with workflow-based web forms, they can be conveniently retrieved using an enterprise content management system. What’s more, using secure ECM for this process ensures your organization stays in full compliance with privacy standards for the sensitive information within these documents. This drastically simplifies audits from a mad dash for information to a few simple searches and, in the event your records are frequently lost or misplaced, may even eliminate thousands of dollars in fines.

Ensure Privacy Compliance

Human resources documentation frequently contains private and even protected employee information with specific standards and best practices for handling it. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability ACT (HIPAA) have strict provisions about handling employee health information for insurance and accommodations. In fact, Walmart recently settled a claim involving unauthorized disclosure of medical information and has since implemented new controls and best practices.

Private facts disclosed about employees by an employer can also result in accountability in civil action lawsuits, making it crucial to limit access to this information to those who need it and are trained to handle it. Storing this information in a solution that adheres to and enforces privacy best practices ultimately helps protect your organization from legal liability and reputational damage in cases like this.

Account-based access controls limit information to those who need it for their line of work. This reduces the number of points of failure in a leak and ensures those with access to this data have the training to handle it. In addition, single sign-on functionality and audit trails provide oversight to access and changes to employee records to quickly investigate suspicious activity. Finally, cloud provider compliance with privacy best practices like Standard Operating Procedures (SOC) and HIPAA ensures that your solution provider is doing their part to protect this data as well.

Stay Prepared for Legal Claims

Legal claims regarding harassment, discrimination, wrongful termination, and more are taken very seriously by both the public and courts of law, and even if you, as an employer, have done everything correctly, you likely won’t be able to prove your claim without access to the necessary records. Hiring notes, disciplinary records, employment contracts, performance reviews, and improvement plans are all documents that can help prove that your organization had legitimate reasons for the actions it took, making easy access to them crucial to a swift resolution of the case.

Capturing these documents with highly accurate, AI-assisted, full-text OCR, and archiving them in an enterprise content management system allows relevant information for the current case to be compiled in record time. This allows more of your staff to focus on business as usual throughout the legal process while expediting a resolution to minimize the case’s impact on your organization.

Summary

By securely managing human resources documentation and archiving it with the right tools for convenient retrieval, HR departments can ensure painless audits, secure employee data, and readiness for potential litigation in the event of legal action. Adopting intelligent information management and implementing best practices allows your human resources department to streamline information retrieval, avoid hefty penalties, and navigate challenging times like audits and legal processes with ease.

How Square 9 Can Help

Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent information management solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.