Payroll reporting structure 357



  • Please can anyone tell me to whom a Payroll manager should report under the Sarbanes Oxley act? i.e. can they report to the Human Resources Manager or should they always report to a finance manager and why?
    My company’s current thinking is that the Payroll Manager should report to the Finance Manager as it is the HR Manager who sets the level of salary, it should therefore be a different manager who pays the employees to ensure a check of the salary level. Is this correct? :?:



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  • In my company, the Payroll manager reports to the Tax manager.
    But, we still have the Accounting manager checking the salary levels for each salary run



  • Please can anyone tell me to whom a Payroll manager should report under the Sarbanes Oxley act? i.e. can they report to the Human Resources Manager or should they always report to a finance manager and why?
    The Sarbanes-Oxley Act does not place any requirement on this.

    My company’s current thinking is that the Payroll Manager should report to the Finance Manager as it is the HR Manager who sets the level of salary, it should therefore be a different manager who pays the employees to ensure a check of the salary level. Is this correct? :?:

    This is not unusual. Payroll is fundamentally about distributing cash to employees therefore PAYMENT of payroll is often a finance responsibility - at a minimum you would expect to see some controls within finance over payroll distributions.
    That said ADMINISTRATION of payroll is usually an HR responsibility, therefore your decision may be informed by the relative proportions of the administration and payment aspects of the payroll manager’s job.
    Another possible way of administering things would be for the HR department to be responsible for running the payroll i.e. calculating it, but for finance to actually make the payments i.e. send the payment file to the bank or do the cheque run.
    Ultimately, how you do this is a Company decision. As long as the process is controlled SOX does not mandate how this shoudl be done.


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