The Challenge
Infor is a large multinational technology company with a global presence in over 40 countries. By the nature of their business, a significant portion of employees are required to travel regularly for work. This high volume of business travel opens up Infor to compliance risk, and in the early 2010s they were audited in both the US and the UK.
The key challenges Infor faced:
- Accurately tracking 6,000+ global travelers annually
- Complex and varied regional compliance requirements to adhere to with 100+ countries touched as well as all 50 US states
- 300+ ongoing projects with the need to understand what type of work is being done when travel occurs
- Increased risk of audit from international authorities for tax and immigration compliance
To manage this complex population of mobile employees, Infor formed a Global Mobility team with a strong tax background. They quickly realized that to keep up with regulatory compliance from the large number of countries and jurisdictions touched by their business travelers, accurate and up-to-date data would be key.
About Infor
Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. With operations in over 40 countries, Infor provides enterprise software solutions to organizations worldwide. Learn more at www.infor.com
6,000+
Annual Travelers
100+
Countries Touched
300+
Ongoing Projects
40+
Country Presence
The Solution
Infor needed a technology offering that would automate business travel tracking, streamline payroll withholding, flag potential immigration events, and provide reliable data in case of future audits. In addition, they came to Topia looking for a solution that would:
- Track employee footprint, identifying when employees crossed thresholds in host jurisdictions
- Provide an unintrusive, easy to use solution and user experience for employees
- Maintain privacy and data security compliance with the various international privacy regulations
Seeing that Topia offered the best solution to meet their needs, Infor moved forward with a phased rollout of Topia Compass, country by country, with the initial set of travelers implemented on the system in a few short weeks. A phased rollout approach was used to balance the need for quick action and results, while also recognizing the large number of employees and countries that would need to be accounted for.
To make the process easy for employees, Infor used Topia's background laptop app, which enabled Infor's IT team to remotely install the app directly on devices as it was rolled out to new employee populations.
During the course of this rollout, Topia worked closely with Infor to gain European Works Council approval to use the Topia app with EMEA based employees. This was necessary to collect employee location data while showing that the information respected employee privacy, and required their approval for data collection and transmission.
The Results
The use of Topia has drastically improved the compliance management of Infor's business travel population. Infor now uses Topia for the following use cases:
US Multi-State Payroll
- Identify non-resident state-to-state travelers
- Calculate the apportionment of time between home and host states
- Report and remit tax based on Topia data
International Payroll
- Topia data triggers onboarding to the mobility tax process
- Includes review of A1 / Certificate of Coverage requirements, and reporting and payment of local income taxes
- Began reporting in 2017; 33 countries online today
Risk Management
- Analyze past travel patterns, locations, and duration to identify compliance needs, costs, and build support for and development of the program
Posted Workers Directive Compliance
- Travel bookings and Topia data to be used to trigger Posted Worker assessment
- Based on the assessment results, filings are made
With Topia, Infor is able to save the global mobility team thousands of hours in the manual effort required to collect, track, and process travel information.