The White House Office of Management and Budget estimates Americans spend over 8.5 billion hours a year filling out government forms (and this does not even include State forms).  Filling out forms is monotonous, and monotony can lead to carelessness – the IRS says that 33% of employers make mistakes on their payroll forms.  Fortunately, RPA is here to help.

Utilizing Robotic Process Automation (RPA), software bots can complete and submit the seemingly endless stream of federal and state forms and reports faced by large and small businesses alike. While RPA is not a replacement for traditional tax generation or payroll calculation software, it can handle intermediate-level form calculations and fully automate the laborious and error-prone process of manually transferring data to any government form or website.  Including, but not limited to:

• Income Taxes
• Employment Taxes and Withholdings
• Excise Taxes
• Sales and Use Taxes
• DOL Reporting
• FLSA Reporting
• OSHA Reporting
• FMLA Reporting
• ACA Reporting
• DEQ Reporting
• DOT Reporting

Government forms are typically completed and submitted in three different methods, and RPA can accommodate them all.

Online submittal

An RPA bot can extract (or calculate) the required information from internal systems or reports, log into the associated government portal, enter the necessary data on the screen and submit the information. After submittal, the bot sends a confirmation email to the internal company stakeholder that includes a summary of the data entered.

PDF (fillable form)

An RPA bot can extract (or calculate) the required information from internal systems or reports and populate this data into the appropriate PDF fillable form fields. Once the form is complete, it is emailed to the proper authority and/or archived to an internal server location for the internal company stakeholder to submit.

PDF (non-fillable) or Paper Forms

As shown in this LTA automation sample video, these challenging forms can be digitized and overlaid in Excel. An RPA bot can then extract (or calculate) required information from internal systems or reports and populate this data into the appropriate spreadsheet cells for the form.  Once the spreadsheet-based form is complete, the bot saves it as a PDF to an internal server location and emails a copy to the internal company stakeholder for emailing (or print/mail) to the proper authority.

As you can see, leveraging RPA software bots to handle your recurring governmental data submissions provides a substantial efficiency gain for your constrained back-office support teams.  While at the same time eliminating keying and transcription errors in the data submitted.

Contact us today to learn more about leveraging RPA to eliminate tedious, mundane, and repetitive form submittals; empowering your back office teams to focus more on what matters most: the experience and success of your customers, employees, vendors, and partners.