Shubham Joshi is an experienced content marketer at FactoHR
Why, at the time of recruitment, candidates are told not to share their payroll and other confidential information with anyone? While considering confidentiality at first, many companies also get an NDA – Non-Disclosure Agreement signed from the candidates. This reflects the importance of the security of employees’ payroll information.
And employees’ are not the only responsible individuals for their salary information, but the organization itself possesses the authority to process their salaries and thus maintain the data. But these people already have enough functions to look for on their plate, apart from patrolling the salary information.
But have you (as an organization/employer) stressed the loss of any information. We have seen the increased usage of technology in almost every sector, which includes hacking also. There are specific measures, including the ethical use of technology to protect the data, as the responsibility of the organization.
Why Is Payroll Secrecy Essential For An Organization?
Just before I said, that organization and employee signed an agreement describing the matter of payroll secrecy and the outcome of breaching it. But have you ever wondered why people give too much importance to this? Let’s understand this term to an extent.
Once you complete your monthly payroll process, it is apparent that you ensure the security of data. However, unethical practices by nature itself cannot be wholly eradicated, especially when you find yourself in a heavy competitive circle. These unethical activities are at times so challenging and make it even difficult to be aware of or trace the happenings of such issues. In case we aren’t vigilant or secured the data, it leads to more significant consequences, where your competitors can breach your information and use it for their own benefit. For instance, by the time you realize the data theft, the competitor could have analyzed the data and offered better pay to your talented employee. And the consequence is – within a matter of just a few days, you would have lost your good employee.
Now, assume you have two employees with similar degrees and working in the same department. But due to differences in their experience level, both are given different posts with different salary structures. Now, this is an obvious thing every employer would follow.
Some fine day these two find out the differences between their payments, which is when the crisis is born. You still trust your employees to understand the difference, but what if they are not aware of the employment rules or they are just freshers. This risk is even more significant if employees came to know about each other’s tax implications and benefits received by the government schemes. Thus to reduce such impact of jealousy, contracts have been signed up, and employers keep salary secret.
Scared! Relax cause I have listed here down the various security measures which you can apply.
How To Keep Your Payroll Confidential?
After gaining the importance of keeping payroll data confidential, here are the ways to protect it using technology, in no particular order.
Utilize The Technology
Technology, as said, is now penetrated into every sector where a human works. Why not to use it when it can provide data security along with methods to run the administrative tasks rapidly.
SaaS solutions offer organizations to cover their operational tasks, including salary payment, technically and using a cloud-based platform. These solutions also offer the organization with high encryption for the storage of data.
When an employer is using cloud platforms to run and store their information, it gives personally accessible login credentials to authorized users only who can change and manage the data. Other users cannot even access such data, thus implementing role-wise rights distribution.
Distribute Task Duties
One subtle way of securing the payroll is by distributing the tasks needed to be accomplished during the functions to various authorities. The benefit is that if your operations are distributed, the different set of information would be with different persons, and it will be hard for fraudsters to breach into each of the files where the data is stored.
Update Your Passwords Often
Using technology that offers data access according to the user, asks for a particular ID and password. Users can set up these passwords according to their needs and willingness. But over time, if the password is not changed, it is easy for the hackers to analyze it.
As the vulnerability of passwords lies in being linked to personal data like birthdate or some special number or something else, it is easy to be cracked. And when the data includes some crucial information like payment, which we are discussing, this step becomes utmost essential. It is thus advisable to change/update these passwords often. Or what you can do is to rotate these passwords within the salary processing team. Ensure not to share your passwords with anyone.
Lock Hardware Stored Files
For many organizations, it would still be impossible to make up the mind to invest in the online software. What these organizations use is still the traditional method of calculating and updating in the spreadsheets.
In such cases, it is preferable to lock the files to save the sheets from unauthorized access. Better to apply it to every file, including tax information, monthly salary updates, and employee’ benefits calculation. At last, don’t forget to take the backup of these files because offline storage can give trembles as it can be lost in regular system formatting.
Last But Probably Not The Least
We came across all these methods, but still, you can have some more effective ways. It might not be the major ones, but these can assist you in little ways.
- Log-off the system after every usage.
- Create strong passwords and probably not related to anyone, which the hacker may not think.
- Check your storage securities often.
- Set up remote access for authorities processing salary.
At The End Of The Day…
We understood that any organization’s wage structure and benefits administration is essential to be secured whatever methods of processing you use. Now that we know its importance and we discussed the measures to protect the data, no one can stop you from being confidential. Just understand which method to apply when in your payment system, and you can crush any threats or breaches that might come in your path.
