Dealing with HR Records Compliance in the Philippine BPO Sector

Records management and document retention are challenging tasks for all companies, regardless of size. As a company scales, the number of compliance practices to deal with grows. For BPO companies, this is especially true, especially with their large workforce. 

  

Large Headcount and Turnover

It is a known fact in the Philippine BPO industry that high employee turnover is a continuous challenge.  Multiply that by large employee headcounts, it becomes almost untenable.

Customers of BPO companies from more industrialized nations demand compliance to record-keeping to deal with their country's regulatory agencies.  These compliance parameters are usually part of their contracts and service level agreements (SLAs).

Here are some of the issues that currently face the men and women working in Human Resources and Finance teams in the BPO sector.

 

Very High Costs

Administration

Managing records is a very tedious task that involves sorting, filing, retrieval, and storage.  Each of these tasks comes with a price tag associated with the labor required to do it.

An even larger cost is the time spent by management personnel collating the required information month-on-month.

Document Retention

Keeping files in an office costs money and space requirements for storing documents are quite substantial.  Each employee in the BPO sector would have about 15-20 documents each having 3-5 pages on average, which would be in the order of 75-100 pages of records per employee.  But what makes it really expensive is the prescribed retention periods.  Record of clearances, contributions, and employment contracts need to be retained for at least 10 years.

Typical Records

• Police Clearance
• NBI Clearance
• BIR tax contributions and withholding certificates
• SSS, Philhealth, and Pag-Ibig contributions and withholding certificates
• Employment Contracts
• Waivers and other policy acceptance documents
  
  

Data Privacy and Accountability

The Data Privacy Act of 2012 considers employers as personal information controllers.  Under this regulation, employers are required to implement reasonable and appropriate organizational, physical, and technical security measures for the protection of personal data. Employers must register with the NPC if any of the following conditions are met:

• it employs at least 250 employees
• the processing includes sensitive personal information (as defined in subsection iii, below) of at least 1,000 individuals
• the processing is likely to pose a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects
• the processing is not occasional.  

• If the employer qualifies on the stated conditions above, the following is the summary of steps required to manage their employees' Personally Identifiable Information (PII):
• Assign a privacy administrator
• Institute protection mechanisms against breaches.
• Be accountable for data privacy. 

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Streamline your HR Records through an End-to-End Solution

Dealing with all these challenges would require the implementation of multiple components in order to streamline and cut costs. These components are:

• A Document Management System with data-mining and integration capabilities to connect to existing HRIS (Human Resources Information Systems) and Finance systems.
• Imaging Services (To digitize paper records)
• Records Management Facility (to store paper records at lower costs)

 

 

Helpful articles:

Protecting Confidential HR Records with Document Management System