25+ Years in Payroll Has Taught Me About Governance

By Manish Mehta, Regional Director of Payroll Operations and Head of Global Support Services, APAC

When I started in payroll more than 25 years ago, success was relatively straightforward: get people paid accurately, on time and in compliance with local requirements.

Those fundamentals haven't changed. But almost everything around them has.

Today, payroll sits at the intersection of employee experience, compliance, financial control, technology, data and increasingly complex global operating models. Expectations around governance have risen significantly too. We have seen organisations face substantial penalties for compliance failures, while a poorly managed payroll experience can quickly damage employee trust and, ultimately, the reputation of an employer.

My own view of payroll has evolved alongside that change.

Having spent much of my career building and running payroll operations, first as an entrepreneur and now within a larger global organisation, I have come to see governance less as a framework and more as an everyday operating discipline.

And one thing experience has taught me is that payroll is never bulletproof.

Over the years, I have seen most of the issues payroll professionals work hard to prevent: incorrect data, payment issues, missed steps, statutory challenges, unclear ownership and situations that weren't escalated early enough.

Sometimes there was no control. But quite often, there was.

That's an important distinction.

When something goes wrong, the questions I tend to ask are quite simple: What caused it? Was there a compromise in the SOP or control? And what do we change to make sure it doesn't happen again?

Regular audits and strong controls are essential, but controls shouldn't become a box-ticking exercise. A process is only valuable if people understand why it exists, follow it consistently and challenge something when it doesn't look right.

For me, good governance isn't about having more controls. It's about having controls that work and people who understand their accountability.

One thing that hasn't changed throughout my career is my belief in people.

Payroll professionals work under enormous pressure. For much of every month they are managing immovable deadlines, multiple payrolls, changing legislation, client expectations and dependencies on information from other teams.

We sometimes take that pressure for granted.

And wherever people are working under pressure, there will always be the possibility of human error.

The answer isn't to remove people from the process. It's to support them with the right processes, technology and governance.

Even something as straightforward as a buddy system, where a colleague independently reviews another person's payroll, can be an extremely effective control. It provides another set of eyes and, perhaps more importantly, creates a culture where colleagues look out for each other.

I am equally passionate about continuous learning. Payroll legislation, technology and employee expectations continue to evolve, and we have to keep investing in the domain knowledge of the people responsible for delivering it.

Technology can make good payroll teams better. It cannot compensate for a team that doesn't understand payroll.

One of my biggest learning experiences in recent years has come from centralising global support functions into our Malaysia hub, spanning areas such as payments, reconciliations, billing, credit control and Global Insights.

It reinforced something very quickly: centralisation isn't simply about moving work.

Documentation, knowledge transfer, training, communication and local expertise all matter. But perhaps the most important lesson has been clarity of accountability.

Over the last couple of years, I have become a strong believer in using RACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed — to make roles and responsibilities explicit.

It is a relatively simple concept, but when work crosses functions, teams and countries, that clarity becomes incredibly important. Who is responsible for doing the work? Who ultimately owns the outcome? Who needs to be consulted before a decision is made? And who needs to be kept informed?

If those questions aren't answered clearly, assumptions quickly fill the gaps.

And if everybody thinks somebody else owns the next step, quite often nobody does.

This applies to knowledge as much as operational processes. Global Insights, for example, brings together payroll and compliance knowledge across different jurisdictions through a centralised global function. The value of centralisation is consistency, visibility and access to expertise — not removing the importance of local knowledge.

We tried to standardise everything. We couldn't — and that was a good lesson.

We learned this firsthand when we set out to harmonise payroll processes across Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

Our objective was to create a more unified APAC approach, with greater consistency in processes and controls.
We made significant progress and achieved around 80–85% standardisation.

But the remaining 15–20% taught us just as much.

Every market has local nuances. Legislation, statutory requirements, payroll practices, payment processes and employee expectations vary. Trying to force every country into an identical process can sometimes introduce risk rather than remove it.

That experience reinforced one of the principles I now strongly believe in:

Standardise globally, but listen locally.

Global governance should provide consistency around controls, accountability, escalation and risk management. But it should never remove the local expertise required to deliver payroll properly.

I've worked across both in-house and partner-delivered payroll models, and one potential trap in multi-country payroll is assuming that because an activity has been outsourced, accountability has gone with it.

It hasn't.

The employee doesn't experience the delivery chain between employer, global payroll provider, local payroll partner and payment provider.

They experience one thing: their pay.

Someone therefore has to own the outcome from end to end.

Over the years, I have helped many global organisations establish their operations in APAC.

Some arrived with relatively small teams. We helped them navigate the local payroll environment, establish processes and understand requirements, often providing considerable hand-holding during those early stages.

I've then had the privilege of watching some of those organisations grow over many years.

Those experiences have probably taught me as much about payroll governance as any formal framework.

When a business is establishing itself in a new country, it doesn't simply need a payroll processor. It needs people who understand the local environment, anticipate what the business doesn't yet know and are prepared to guide it.

Some of the client testimonials I value most have come from those relationships because we weren't simply processing payroll — we were part of their journey.

It is also why I believe the best payroll relationships are partnerships. Clear responsibilities, timely communication, transparency and the confidence to raise an issue early are as important as the payroll process itself.

Moving from entrepreneurship into a larger global organisation has also changed the way I think about governance.

Entrepreneurs naturally tend to assess risk through a relatively immediate lens: What is the impact? What does the customer need? How quickly can we solve the problem?

Larger organisations look at risk differently. Reputation, liability, compliance and the potential wider consequences of a decision all need to be considered alongside the immediate commercial impact.

I've learned from both perspectives.

The discipline and governance of a larger organisation are important, particularly when operating across multiple countries and at greater scale.

But there is another side to it. Risk assessment can sometimes become lengthy, with multiple layers of process and escalation. When that happens, there is a danger of losing sight of the customer and the original problem we were trying to solve.

For me, the balance matters.

Good governance should protect the organisation without paralysing it.

We need robust controls and appropriate risk management, but we also need the willingness to make decisions and remain close to the people affected by them.

Technology changes payroll. It doesn't remove accountability.

I'm a strong believer in technology and automation, and AI will undoubtedly change payroll further.

But technology doesn't remove the need for governance. If anything, automation can allow mistakes to happen at greater scale.

That's why I'm passionate about continuous learning and domain knowledge. Technology can identify anomalies, remove repetitive work and provide better insights, but we still need payroll professionals who understand what the output means, recognise when something doesn't look right and know when human judgement is required.

For me, the future isn't technology replacing payroll professionals.

It's better technology combined with better payroll professionals.

After more than 25 years in payroll, my approach to governance has actually become simpler.

1. Never assume. Verify.
Where money, compliance and people's livelihoods are involved, assumptions create unnecessary risk.

2. Fix first, investigate second.
Protect the employee and client first. Then establish the root cause and learn from it.

3. Outsourcing doesn't mean outsourcing accountability.
Somebody must ultimately own the payroll outcome.

4. Standardise globally but listen locally.
Consistency is valuable, but local expertise should never be designed out of the operating model.

5. Escalate early.
A small issue communicated early is usually manageable. An issue hidden or left unresolved rarely gets smaller.

Payroll has changed enormously since I started in the industry, and it will continue to change.

But I don't believe the fundamentals of good governance will change nearly as much.

Clear ownership. Meaningful controls. Strong domain knowledge. Local expertise. Continuous learning. And people who care enough to question something when it doesn't look right.

Because we may process thousands of payslips, but every employee experiences only one — their own.
And after more than 25 years in payroll, I still think that's the best place to start.

For organisations looking to strengthen their understanding of global payroll governance and related operational challenges, further insights into international payroll and compliance can support ongoing best practice. If you would like to explore these topics in more detail, you can use our contact form to discuss them with our team.