04:05 INTERVIEW
beyond its traditional operational role towards greater governance, assurance and visibility across the hire-to-retire lifecycle. This interview has been edited for clarity GPA: Tell us how you got started in payroll. Eric Liaw: I studied accounting and employment law at university and started my career as an accountant and became a finance manager for a hotel. My role included the payroll function, but I had little to do with it directly. However, I was pressed in to do my first payroll following a tragedy; the payroll manager’s husband had been killed in a car accident. I then had to focus on doing the payroll for 300 people. Fortunately, there were procedures in place, but it still was baptism by fire. I had to roll up my sleeves to become a payroll manager and to make sure those people got paid. That was my introduction to payroll. One thing I learned about payroll is that every time we produce a pay slip, there’s a person behind it, and behind the person there’s maybe a family; they rely on this person to pay the bills, to buy groceries, and so on.
A PMP-certified project professional based in Australia, Eric brings these disciplines together to help organisations understand and manage payroll risk, strengthen governance and provide executives with greater confidence that employees are being paid correctly. His work spans payroll compliance and assurance, complex remediation programs, Award and Enterprise Agreement interpretation, and payroll governance and controls. Eric is also an active contributor to the payroll community through professional publications, industry forums, mentoring and thought leadership. He is particularly interested in how payroll is evolving
I love the numbers. I love the technology, and I love employment law. In payroll, I can bring all these elements together--numbers, technology, employment law--to produce a pay slip, which is actually a human outcome that families and communities rely on. It’s a human story.
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GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE ISSUE 27
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