[nradov]

Read up on the history Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3). The team worked for 7 years and although they achieved some technical goals they never managed to deliver a working payroll system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...

Payroll is harder than it looks due to all the edge cases. For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates?

[a1369209993]

> For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates?

By issuing a error and demanding that a human deal with it. Obviously.

[nradov]

Surely you jest? If that was a serious comment then you obviously have no understanding of the business and legal requirements for payroll systems.

[a1369209993]

If you're legally required do your payroll with a buggy computer system rather than manually (and not even "this specific buggy computer that we gave you", just any old buggy piece of crap), then, uh, I don't really know what to say to that. My condolences, I guess?

If you mean it's impractical and error-prone to do payroll manually, well that's the point of automating >99.999% of it. For the remaining <0.001%, someone is going to have decide how to deal with it, and I'm sceptical that a programmer seven years ago will know better than a lawyer today what the legal requirements today are.

[nradov]

The level of aggressive ignorance in HN comments can be quite shocking. There is no legal requirement to use any particular payroll system. The payroll rules are written by domain experts including lawyers and others, and encoded into rules engines.

[SPBS]

Well, how do existing manual systems deal with it? Why not just make do with partial automation and fall back on the existing methods for those thorny legal edge cases?

[nradov]

Except for the smallest local businesses, there is literally no such thing as existing manual systems anymore. It's simply not possible to do manual payroll while maintaining compliance with laws, regulations, civil orders, labor contracts, and company policies. Every significant enterprise has either built up a custom automated system over decades, or has customized a commercial ERP payroll module, or outsourced the entire thing to a specialized payroll company.

You could argue that payroll shouldn't be so complex but that's the reality of it today.