New partnership streamlines compliance workflows to determine where and when employees are traveling, taxes are owed, and immigration or other compliance risks are triggered
SAN FRANCISCO – September 8, 2020 – Topia announced a partnership with BCD Travel, one of the world’s largest corporate travel management companies, to automate business travel and distributed workforce compliance (tax, payroll, and immigration). Through this partnership, Topia adds value to BCD’s clients by pulling their travel booking data into its Topia Compass offering. Topia Compass then calculates tax exposures, multi-jurisdiction payroll withholdings, and immigration requirements while supporting the Posted Workers Directive and other compliance matters. The BCD-Topia partnership strengthens Topia One, Topia’s new, end-to-end Global Talent Mobility platform while furthering its mission to break down barriers between people and places and enable work everywhere.
Enterprises with mobile employees often struggle to determine where they have compliance exposures and when such exposures are triggered. Domestic and international business trips, assignments, and relocations affect where the organization is responsible for payroll withholding and where it has permanent establishments. HR and accounting departments that fail to keep track of these mobile employees and the resulting compliance obligations risk having to pay hefty penalties. However, manual efforts to monitor movement and calculate taxes tend to be expensive and inaccurate.
Topia solves these problems by gathering and analyzing travel or other location data and personnel records from multiple systems within the enterprise and then automatically calculating tax exposures, payroll withholdings, and immigration or other compliance requirements. BCD offers another valuable source of trusted location data that Topia will analyze to simplify and streamline compliance for Topia and BCD’s shared customers. With this integration, Topia adds BCD to its growing list of industry-leading integrated partners.
“This partnership with Topia will help our shared clients minimize compliance risks and streamline an important part of their travel and talent mobility workflows,” said Yannis Karmis, Senior Vice President at BCD Travel. “Partners like Topia help demonstrate the value of BCD’s SolutionSource® marketplace and enable our customers to gain more value from their travel program.”
The Topia-BCD integration works as follows:
- Pre-trip: Topia Compass will analyze booking data from BCD to identify potential visa and immigration considerations and where tax or other compliance exposures could occur.
- Mid-trip: Topia monitors employee movement in real-time to flag tax exposure before it is created and to map the company’s global travel footprint for both health and safety reasons, as well as ongoing visa, immigration, and tax compliance. Companies can define thresholds based on their internal risk tolerance to ensure that employees change locations before creating exposure.
- Post-trip: Topia calculates the final compliance obligations and feeds them to relevant systems, such as payroll.
Altogether, data from BCD enables Topia to automate the tracking, reporting, and compliance process for a workforce that is on the move.
“The world’s best-known brands trust BCD to manage employee travel around the world. Their system provides the robust data that Topia One can leverage to keep employees safe and companies compliant, wherever they go,” said Anupam Singhal, SVP of Strategic Partnerships at Topia. “Clients who take advantage of this integration can eliminate the uncertainty and risks associated with their distributed and mobile employees across tax jurisdictions.”
To integrate Topia into your BCD program, visit https://solutionsource.bcdtravel.com/solutions/topia/
About BCD Travel
BCD Travel helps companies make the most of what they spend on travel. We give travelers innovative tools that keep them safe and productive, and help them make good choices on the road. We partner with travel and procurement leaders to simplify the complexities of business travel, drive savings and satisfaction, and move whole companies toward their goals. In short, we help our clients travel smart and achieve more. We make this happen in 109 countries with almost 14,900 creative, committed and experienced people. And it’s how we maintain the industry’s most consistent client retention rate, with 2019 sales of US$27.5 billion. For more information, visit www.bcdtravel.com.