TCS payroll generates Form 16 documents in record time

The document, which is usually generated by June, was processed early to enhance “employee experience” and the technology prcesses used have the potential to be commercialised for customers, Lakshminarayanan GS, Deputy Chief Finance Officer, TCS told ET.

The solution to fastrack Form 16 was co-created by TCS teams across Payroll Finance Team, Internal IT solutions and dedicated technology team for internal finance operations, said Lakshminarayanan.

“This is one area which has the potential of being commercialized also. Our first focus was to give a better employee experience, it is possible for us to take it as a solution to our sales teams also, but that is something that we will be doing with going forward,” he said.

Salaried individuals can obtain Form 16 on or before the 15th of June of the following year by the employer, immediately after the financial year in which the tax is deducted. If any employer delays or fails to issue Form 16 by the specified date, then the employer is liable to pay a penalty.

The process was initiated as early as September 2022 by the TCS internal payroll team and was entirely executed through in-house expertise and digitisation, said Ashwini Kennedy, Head Global Employee Services- Corporate Finance.

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“We actually have over 600,000 associates spread across 50 plus countries and then we process over 1 million payslips annually from a single center of excellence for payroll and employee services,” said Kennedy. She added that providing the employees a larger window to file their tax returns was the core purpose of this initiative. “Over 1.8 million documents were generated and rolled out within a matter of 15 days (after the closure of the financial year),” she said. The employee services team also implemented a number of other use cases to digitise employee claims and tax processes. “We have implemented an AI-based solution to process employee claims over five years back,” she added.