SUCRA

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System for Universal Compliance Reporting & Analytics for HR and Payroll

Copyright 2015 Deji Akadiri

All Rights Reserved.

SUCRA ENABLES
COMPANIES OF ALL SIZES
TO AUDIT THEIR HR AND
PAYROLL DATA AND
TRANSACTIONS, ENFORCE
COMPANY BUSINESS
RULES AND REGULATORY
COMPLIANCE, AND
GENERATE EXCEPTION
REPORTS, REGARDLESS OF
PAYROLL/HR VENDOR OR
DATABASE REPOSITORY.

Our Patent-pending Data-Mapping technology works with any

HR or Payroll system with a relational database back-end. An
intuitive GUI interface makes SUCRA easy to use, even for
non-technical users.

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THE CHALLENGE

Companies in every region of the globe, ranging from small companies with less than 10 employees, to
mega-corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees, almost all use the following software
packages:
o
o
o
o

Office Productivity (email, word processing, spreadsheets, web browsers)

HR/Payroll systems
ERP/CRM (Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management)
Accounting Packages

THE HR/PAYROLL SYSTEM

If we look at HR/Payroll systems, the most common challenges involve keeping track of who your
employees are, how and when they are being paid, and how your processes comply with company
business rules and policies, as well as the growing number of external regulatory and legal imperatives.
Addressing these challenges requires an end-to-end understanding of the components that make up
your HR/Payroll environment.
You need to be intimately familiar with your HR/Payroll providers data structures, database schema and
business entities, and the relationships between these entities, including Employees, Salaries, Banks,
tables, columns, views, primary keys and foreign keys, to name just a few.
THE DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
In addition to the details of your HR/Payroll vendors technical details, you will also need to have the
technical skills and knowledge to query the particular brand of proprietary database engine
underpinning your HR/Payroll system. Typically, this would be Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2,
SQLite, or other Relational Database Management System.

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You will need to be familiar with the syntax and conventions of your database vendors dialect of the
SQL query language.
THE RULES
Finally, you will need to define, develop and maintain a set of business rules, data validation criteria, and
compliance checks. Your HR/Payroll data must be regularly tested for compliance against these business
rules, and exception reports must be produced.

CURRENT STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

Given the proliferation of HR/Payroll vendors in the market, combined with the wide range of available
Database Management Systems, it is clear that developing a generic or universal solution to the problem
of HR/Payroll Compliance Reporting is extremely challenging. In fact, to date, no such Universal Solution
exists. Most companies either ignore or de-prioritize the need for regular compliance reporting, or they
expend valuable resources and time trying to invent and build their own in-house solutions.
The absence of a structured and repeatable packaged process for HR/Payroll data Compliance
Management and Reporting leaves companies vulnerable to Payroll fraud, ghost employees, and
invalid or corrupt corporate data.
This threat is not hypothetical. It is very real, and costs companies billions of dollars annually.
The 2013 Annual Fraud Indicator report by the UK Governments National Fraud Authority (NFA)
concludes that in the UK Public Sector alone, Payroll Fraud amounts to 335 MILLION annually.

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Other regions are equally vulnerable to fraud.

According to a PwC Middle East Economic Crime
Survey published in 2014, the following trends
can be seen for HR/Payroll fraud in the Middle
East Region.

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Discovering and addressing HR/Payroll fraud is notoriously difficult, as fraudsters devise new methods
and strategies to steal from companies by data manipulation. Companies must remain vigilant, flexible
and intelligent in their efforts to combat fraud and non-compliance.
A 2011 Report by Ernst & Young proposes the following roadmap for implementing an internal
Compliance and Auditing process:

This roadmap illustrates the processes and phases that must be included as part of the companys
internal data compliance, analytics and auditing exercise. Without the adoption of intelligent tools and
automation, most companies would be overwhelmed by these requirements and would lack the
resources required to perform these tasks on a continuous basis.
SUCRA helps companies to encapsulate, implement and automate the process map shown above.

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THE SOLUTION

To address the absence of a structured and repeatable packaged process for HR/Payroll data
Compliance Management and Reporting, we developed SUCRA.
As described in the previous sections, the main obstacles that have historically prevented the
development of a Universal Solution are as follows:
DIFFERENT HR/PAYROLL SYSTEMS
Each HR/Payroll vendor has their own proprietary data structures, logical schema and business entities.
There is no industry standard for Employees, Salaries, Banks, tables, columns, views, relationships, etc.
DIFFERENT DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Each HR/Payroll system sits on top of a back-end data repository, which is usually a database vendors
proprietary database engine. This is usually Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, SQLite, or other
relational database management system. Each of these products offers their own flavor or
implementation of the SQL database language. Syntax, conventions and extensions are often
incompatible with other vendors database offerings.
COMPLIANCE RULES IMPLEMENTATION
An expanding and evolving collection of Company Business Rules and Policies, and external Regulatory
and Legal Compliance imperatives must be defined, tested and maintained. There is no universally
recognized industry-standard for describing and defining these Business Rules.

SUCRA HR/PAYROLL VENDOR INDEPENDENCE

SUCRA addresses these obstacles with a patent-pending integrated solution that enables HR/Payroll
independent Business Rules and Database Independent Queries and Reports.
SUCRA does not reference the HR/Payroll vendors physical data entities directly. Instead, SUCRA
Business Rules reference high-level, abstract universal logical entity aliases such as
{EMPLOYEE_BIRTHDATE}, {CHEQUE_NUMBER}, or {EMPLOYEE_NUMBER}.

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These aliases represent universal business entities which are present in all HR/Payroll systems,
regardless of vendor data structure, schema, or SQL syntax.
The SUCRA user does not need to know that the SUCRA expression {EMPLOYEE_BIRTHDATE} actually
refers to their HR systems DATE_OF_BIRTH column, in the PERSONS table, in the dbo schema in the
SQL Server HRMS database, otherwise known as dbo.PERSONS.DATE_OF_BIRTH.
This abstraction of SUCRA Logical data entity aliases, masking and hiding the underlying HR/Payroll
physical database entities, allows the development of truly generic, universal queries and Business
Rules, without the need for intimate knowledge of the specific HR/Payroll platform, schema or language.
We refer to this as Platform Independent Business Rules and Reporting. Using an intuitive Graphical
User Interface, SUCRA enables the user to map the logical business entities to the associated back-end
database tables and columns. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Logical Business Entity mapping

SUCRA DATABASE VENDOR INDEPENDENCE

SUCRA addresses the problem of database incompatibility by adopting Database Federation technology.
SUCRAs federated database treats all HR/Payroll database tables and columns as if they were simply
extensions of the SUCRA database. The heterogeneous HR/Payroll database environment is
transformed into a homogeneous single-database environment.
This means that all HR/Payroll database tables and columns are accessible to SUCRA, seamlessly and
transparently. A single SQL syntax can be used to query all HR/Payroll data, regardless of the database

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vendor. The EMPLOYEE table in the Oracle HR database and the PAYMENTS table in an IBM DB2 Payroll
database are viewed simply as tables belonging to SUCRAs federated database.

SUCRA BUSINESS RULE DEFINITIONS

SUCRA is bundled with over 30 pre-defined Business Rules. These ready-to-run queries include:
o
o
o
o
o

Employees that are present in the Payroll system, but are absent from the HR system
Payroll deposits that exceed $10,000 (or any user-defined figure and currency)
Employees that continue to be paid after retirement or dismissal
Employees that are paid more than 40% above the median salary for their job grade
Payroll deposits to Employees with no valid residential address or National ID number

Each Business Rule is expressed in a language we call SUCRA SQL. SUCRA SQL is an extension of
standard (ANSI) SQL. The syntax is the same as ANSI SQL, but instead of referencing physical database
Tables and Columns, SUCRA SQL references logical universal data entity aliases, such as
{EMPLOYEE_SURNAME} or {PAYROLL_DEPOSIT_DATE}.
At Report run-time, these SUCRA logical entity aliases are substituted with the actual physical database
entity, such as dbo.EMPLOYEES.SURNAME.
Users can also easily create their own Business Rules, according to their companys requirements, with
criteria based on any data contained in their HR and Payroll databases.
The SUCRA Business Rules List form is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Business Rules List

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SUCRA REPORTING
SUCRA exception reports are generated as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which allow users to sort,
filter, format and analyse the data as they require. The report spreadsheets are secured from viewing or
editing by password-protection. Reports can also be produced in the format of a Company-Specific
Payroll Registry.
SUCRA exception reports can be produced on an ad-hoc or batch basis. The user can test and report a
single Business Rule, or run a report that tests and reports all Business Rules, with the results being
displayed as a single report.
Sample report outputs are shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4.

Figure 3. Exception Report Summary Page

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Figure 4. Exception Report Detail

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