INITIATION, EFFECTIVENESS, IMPLEMENTATION, AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION.
WHO WE ARE
With a staff of 44 employees, the University System of Georgia (USG) Shared Services Center (SSC) supports 27 institutions with approximately 57,117 employees including student workers, 8,237 retirees and 1,239 practitioners (campus HR, Payroll and Benefits staff) by providing consolidated payroll, benefits, human resources information systems (HRIS) vendor, retirement contribution processing and call center support.
INITIATION/BACKGROUND
The USG has an established educational assistance program called the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) which allows employees to attend classes at USG institutions for free. The purpose of TAP is to foster the professional growth and development of its eligible employees. The benefits of this program are substantial; however, there are tax implications that must be considered. The federal government currently allows up to $5,250 annually, in employer-provided educational assistance benefits, to be “tax free” to TAP participants. An employee must generally pay taxes on employer-provided educational assistance benefits in excess of $5,250.
The USG SSC is responsible for the coordination of tax reporting for the USG SSC institutions, but before
2013, the SSC was not involved in any processes calculating tuition above $5,250 for taxation implications. In 2013, the SSC was encouraged by USG Internal Audit to begin providing assistance to ensure compliance across the USG. The SSC then embarked on an effort to put this giant puzzle with a million little pieces together.
Background Research
The SSC started out gathering some of the puzzle pieces by contacting institutions to gather the 2013 tuition assistance provided to employees to analyze the data across the USG SSC-supported institutions.
It became apparent that there were reporting inconsistencies across institutions in the processes used to collect, summarize and apply data of individual employees, as well as share with the employee’s home institution if multiple institutions were involved.
Since the TAP process affected several SSC departments (Payroll, Benefits, Human Resources, and
Human Resources Information Systems), an internal team of SSC employees, with representation from each department, was selected to research the processes currently in place at each institution for:


Documenting, tracking, and reporting tuition cost totals to ensure compliance with the
IRS $5,250 reporting requirement for the employee Form W2.

Currently sharing (have been provided or have been obtained) employee tuition credit hour cost information with other USG institutions to ensure cumulative tuition benefit totals for institutional employees.
More puzzle pieces were gathered through an online questionnaire to determine what processes the institutions were currently using to gather TAP data. Results were summarized and presented to the SSC
Leadership Team, the Board of Regents Human Resources Team, and TAP representatives from each institution. After suggestions were received on initial steps, the SSC Team got busy using the collected results from the questionnaire to develop a process to collect the 2014 TAP data from all USG institutions in a more consistent, timely, and accurate manner. The team worked with many contacts at the institutions including TAP Coordinators, Payroll contacts, and Bursars who all needed to share information regarding TAP participants.
The SSC Team created a reporting template in Excel format and instructions to be used by each USG institution for reporting any TAP recipients attending their institution and will be updated annually to reflect any campus consolidations or changes to the IRS reporting guidelines.
There were a few growing pains on the first submission. Not all institutions elected to send their information that first semester mainly because they had no official process at their institution to retrieve/compile the data, particularly by each semester. The SSC Team worked directly with those individual institutions that needed assistance in establishing a collection process of TAP data. By the
2014 Summer semester, the SSC team saw an increase of institutions reporting data, and for Fall 2014 semester (end-of-year reporting) the SSC Team received TAP summary spreadsheet data from all 30 USG institutions. This data reflected 2,742 employees participating in the TAP program, receiving more than
$8M in TAP benefits during 2014.
After these efforts, there were still a few puzzle pieces missing. Because the SSC supports only 27 of the
30 USG institutions, there were three USG institutions that the SSC did not initially interact with: Georgia
Institute of Technology, Georgia Regents University, and the University of Georgia. The SSC Team worked to established TAP contacts with these institutions to include in the reporting loop. Since an employee can attend multiple institutions, all tuition dollars must be summarized into one total to determine if the cumulative amount has reached $5,250 per employee.
The SSC now puts the puzzle together by collecting TAP data three times a year (each semester) and reports cumulative amounts each semester for the institutions to determine if there are tax implications for the employees listed. The TAP representative is also able to notify the employee if their TAP benefits are approaching the IRS $5,250 threshold and may have taxes due before the end of the calendar year.
One can imagine how long it takes to put together a puzzle with 500 pieces; this task for the SSC is much like that in that it is labor intensive and challenging; however, it eliminates the task for each of 30 institutions that would be trying to replicate the same actions, especially for reporting three semesters each year and reduces the risk of being non-compliant with IRS guidelines.