November2024


Meet Mokscha Haack, Senior Payroll SME for EMEA at Zimmer Biomet

Meet Mokscha Haack, Senior Payroll SME for EMEA at Zimmer Biomet
By Frank J. Mendelson

Editor’s Note: Mokscha Haack is a Senior Payroll Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Zimmer Biomet, an orthopaedic implants company. He is a global payroll professional with more than 15 years of experience in the industry. His focus has historically been in EMEA, but he is now working for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) area as well. His current role provides him with the opportunity to support the payroll operations team in areas such as process mapping, continuous improvement, business continuity, and internal training.

 

What resources do you use to stay current on the latest trends and legislation in payroll?

Staying current in global payroll is indeed challenging. Many payroll vendors provide legal updates, but this isn't always sufficient. Some vendors might not offer comprehensive services, especially concerning collective agreements.

For the basics, I use the updates provided by PwC, E&Y, KPMG, and Mazars. These firms cover virtually every country and provide updates in English, making the information accessible.

For detailed, country-specific information, I visit the respective country’s official government websites, such as the labour ministry, social insurance, tax office, and the body in charge of the collective labour agreement. For websites in foreign languages, I use browsers with built-in translators, which are sufficient for obtaining a working translation.

 

What strategic advice would you give to a company moving from a domestic to a global payroll?

DYDD: Do your due diligence. To me, the biggest challenge of expanding into global payroll is understanding that what was obvious domestically may no longer be so internationally. This is especially true for access to information, which becomes more complex and requires thorough preparation.

In domestic payroll, access to information is easy; There are multiple, easily accessible sources of information such as government bodies, payroll gazettes, forums, etc. Additionally, you can also build on your personal experience as a citizen, taxpayer, and employee to fill the blanks.

All of this disappears when moving into global payroll. You need to identify what information is crucial and where to find it. A good starting point is the country fact cards summarising the country’s key payroll features that are provided by several payroll vendors as well as payroll associations, like PayrollOrg.

Choosing the right vendor is crucial. Select a vendor experienced with foreign companies entering their country, one that provides services in English and offers power of attorney (POA) services for in-country tasks. They should also offer comprehensive services beyond payroll calculation, such as tax, HR, consulting, and legal services. Ask for referrals from similar companies they have assisted. Though this may come at a cost, it will likely save you from much costlier fines.

 

What are the things you would like to see payroll vendors address in the next three years?

In an ideal world, I would like payroll vendors to move to truly global platforms. Many vendors, even among the big players, offer global contracts that are only global on paper, using disparate, country-specific tools and processes. These tools date back to a world in which payroll was handled locally. These tools predate globalisation, the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, shared services centres, COVID-19, and remote or cross-border working trends. No shiny new user interface can hide the fact that a particular payroll engine’s core dates to the days of the Cold War.

A truly global platform would require completely rethinking and redeveloping the payroll engine from scratch. This represents significant research and development (R&D) costs that many vendors shy away from. Fortunately, this is changing as new vendors are entering the market with a current generation of software that is adapted to the current payroll generation.

Additionally, global vendors need to understand the importance of local expertise. Software should handle transactional work globally. However, there simply is no replacing the local expert who will ensure compliance and provide valuable advice and insight whenever life presents us with one of these atypical situations.

 

What do you think are the value and limits to emerging technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) in managing a global payroll?

Emerging technologies will only reinforce and amplify the current trend in payroll like in any other office job. Eventually, the payroll professional will be less and less involved in everyday transactional and repetitive tasks as these gradually move over to the machine, from its simplest expression (Visual Basic for Applications [VBA] macros) to its most cutting-edge (generative AI).

As such, payroll professionals will be facing the challenge of needing to have an end-to-end understanding of a process without having the opportunity to perform the work themselves that will be mostly handled by the machine. Regardless of the technical sophistication, machines can yield incorrect results if set up improperly. With an omnipresent AI increasingly taking over the transactional work, spotting mistakes will likely become increasingly difficult.

It is essential to build effective controls that AI can adapt. However, more importantly, there needs to be a reflection on training new professionals. Without the experience of handling transactional work, new professionals must be educated differently to stay on top of the process. I believe this calls for a reflection within the entire industry on what curriculum should be built and offered to payroll professionals.

[Editor’s Note:  Such as PayrollOrg’s Foundations of Payroll Analytics and Intermediate Payroll Analytics.]

 

What are some of the questions a company should ask to determine if there is a good fit with a prospective vendor, and what are your common approaches to vetting vendors?

  1. Again, DYDD: Do your due diligence. You must know your own company, its complexities, and specifics. Get a consultancy to do this for you, if needed. Yes, this is an additional cost, but it pales in comparison to the financial, legal, and image cost of a payroll fiasco.
  2. Meet potential vendors and get a “feeling” for them. See which topics they emphasise and which aren’t mentioned in their presentation.
  3. Ask for referrals from companies with very similar profiles to your own, especially in key locations and/or your most complex locations (factory payroll, retail payroll, multiple jurisdictions, closed groups, etc.)
  4. As part of the request for proposal (RFP), ask them to build a sample for user acceptance testing (UAT), or a beta test. Assess whether they use simple scenarios to ensure functionality or more complex ones to showcase their expertise and test the system thoroughly.

 

What career advice do you give to a new employee in payroll?

Get into the meat and potatoes of it all now. Perhaps the best piece of advice I ever got in payroll was from my first-ever mentor. I asked him what I could do to be ready to take over the payroll. He advised me to manually build a payslip in a spreadsheet. And so, I did. This allowed me to get a fundamental understanding on how all these calculations were made, and of all the links and interdependencies between them, which is a huge advantage.

This was more than 15 years ago, and it is still paying dividends today.


Frank_Mendelson
Frank J. Mendelson is the Acquisitions Editor for PayrollOrg.
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