Payroll Compliance Manager

Payroll Compliance Manager is responsible for developing, maintaining, and monitoring payroll compliance programs and internal controls across the organization. This role ensures payroll practices comply with federal, state, and local wage-and-hour, tax, garnishment, recordkeeping, and reporting requirements. 

The Payroll Compliance Manager will serve as the payroll subject-matter expert for audits, regulatory changes, system controls, policy development, and risk mitigation. The successful candidate must have strong hands-on experience with UKG Pro and UKG Workforce Management and demonstrated proficiency using artificial intelligence tools to improve payroll auditing, compliance monitoring, data analysis, documentation, and operational efficiency. 

Responsibilities  

Payroll Compliance and Governance 

• Monitor compliance with federal, state, and local payroll laws, including wage-and-hour, overtime, minimum wage, final-pay, pay-frequency, meal and rest-period, paid-leave, tax, and record-retention requirements. 

• Maintain a comprehensive payroll compliance calendar covering tax filings, regulatory deadlines, year-end activities, audits, reconciliations, and policy reviews. 

• Research regulatory changes and translate requirements into payroll policies, procedures, system configurations, and operational controls. 

• Partner with Legal, Human Resources, Finance, Tax, Benefits, Operations, and Internal Audit to address payroll compliance risks. 

• Review payroll policies and procedures to ensure consistent application across locations, business units, and employee populations. 

• Maintain documentation supporting payroll decisions, regulatory interpretations, and corrective actions. 

UKG System Compliance 

• Serve as a functional subject-matter expert for UKG Pro and UKG Workforce Management. 

• Evaluate UKG configurations to ensure compliance with company policies, wage-and-hour requirements, and payroll tax rules. 

• Review pay codes, deduction codes, accruals, work rules, overtime rules, rounding rules, holiday rules, security roles, workflows, and approval controls. 

• Partner with Payroll Operations, HRIS, IT, and UKG support teams to test and implement system changes. 

• Develop UKG queries, reports, dashboards, and exception reporting to identify payroll compliance issues. 

• Validate system updates, configuration changes, interfaces, and patches through documented testing and approval processes. 

• Maintain configuration documentation, test scripts, control matrices, and system-change records. 

Artificial Intelligence and Payroll Analytics 

• Use approved AI tools to enhance payroll compliance audits, exception analysis, trend identification, policy research, documentation, and process improvement. 

• Develop and maintain AI-assisted payroll audit prompts, compliance checklists, risk models, and standardized review procedures. 

• Use AI and data analytics to identify anomalies such as duplicate or unusual payments, excessive manual adjustments, repeated missed punches, unauthorized timecard edits, and overtime anomalies.