About the Role
Serve as the single operational contact between company, affiliates, and UKG; consolidate vendor direction with a unified voice.
Responsibilities
- Hold UKG accountable for delivery standards: accuracy, timeliness, and responsiveness.
- Maintain visibility across all vendor engagements, including Senior Payroll Tax Analyst interactions with UKG Tax.
- Track and drive resolution for vendor defects, processing errors, and service gaps.
- Validate payroll outputs including earnings, deductions, taxes, and net pay against expected outcomes, policies, and regulations.
- Manually recreate payroll scenarios to confirm accuracy and identify discrepancies.
- Investigate payroll discrepancies and perform root cause analysis regarding inputs, system configuration, or vendor processing.
- Support US and Canadian expatriate payroll and complex scenarios requiring advanced expertise.
- Define expected payroll outcomes as technical payroll SME without configuring the payroll system.
- Partner with internal HRIS and UKG HRIS to ensure accurate, compliant system configurations and validate changes before go-live.
- Develop test scenarios, execute UAT, and validate changes affecting payroll outcomes.
- Support setup and validation of new state and local tax jurisdictions with the Senior Tax Analyst.
- Validate year-end system outputs including W-2, W-2C, and T-4 reporting.
- Partner on tax-related matters maintaining operational control while Senior Payroll Tax Analyst liaises with UKG Tax.
- Coordinate across HR, Finance, HRIS, and vendor teams to align payroll inputs, systems, and outputs.
- Reinforce payroll operating model boundaries and escalate operational issues appropriately.
- Identify and surface opportunities to improve vendor performance, system integrity, and operational efficiency.
- Provide functional guidance and serve as the payroll resource for internal and affiliate inquiries.
- Other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Accounting, Human Resources, Information Systems, or related field; or equivalent education/experience combination.
- Minimum 8 years payroll experience including managed-service model support.
- Experience holding outsourced payroll providers accountable.
- Multi-state US payroll experience; exposure to Canadian payroll and reporting (T-4).
- Strong payroll calculation and tax structure understanding.
- Manual payroll calculation and validation ability outside payroll systems.
- Payroll system testing experience including test scenario development and UAT.
- Experience with enterprise payroll systems (UKG, SAP, Workday, ADP, or similar).
- Advanced Microsoft Excel skills for data analysis and reconciliation.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and reconciliation abilities.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills with HR, Finance, HRIS, and vendors.
Preferred Skills
- Certified Payroll Professional (CPP) preferred or ability to obtain within 12 months.
- Experience with payroll system implementations, integrations, or upgrades.
- Experience with payroll tax reconciliation and year-end reporting.
- Canadian payroll experience preferred.
- Project or change management experience.
