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Processing W-2s for Nation's Largest County Government Can be a Taxing Task

When tax time approaches and Los Angeles County government has to send out almost 100,000 employees’ W-2 forms, it’s no small undertaking. Techwire takes a look at the numbers in the nation’s largest county government — and the technology driving the task.

When tax time approaches and Los Angeles County government has to process employees’ W-2 forms, it’s no small undertaking. Here’s a look at the numbers in the nation’s largest county government — and the technology driving the task.

  • In-service employees who receive W-2 forms: 87,800
  • Out-of-service employees: 12,073
  • Paperless: 20,306
It took two-a-day shifts for five days for the print operation, including for the county’s Computing Services Branch Production to monitor and feed paper.  

This was the first time paperless W-2s were available two weeks before the Jan. 31 deadline, according to Rebecca Friedman, media services director for IT Services in the county’s Internal Services Department.

“W-2 processing isn’t exactly thought of as the most exciting thing,” Friedman told Techwire, “but the sheer scale of cross-departmental process required to provide nearly 100,000 county employees with the proper documentation makes this quite an accomplishment.”

For those employees who opted to go paperless, their W-2 forms are accessible through the PayStub Viewer application, Friedman noted.

The W-2s were created on the eHR BIRT (BI Reporting Tool), part of the software stack of the eHR application, Friedman said.

“This process generated batches of PDFs and was relatively quick — less than 15 minutes,” she said. “BIRT’s use is primarily in the creation of PDFs and .XMLs, like timesheet and W-2 generation. With the recent upgrade of eHR from Version 3.9 to 3.11 in 2017, CGI switched from using Adobe Central Pro to BIRT.” 

Vendors may be interested to note the county work groups involved, and their respective roles in the process:

  • Computing Services Branch Production Support — printing support, W-2 hard copies.
  • Customer Applications Branch/General Government Services Division — application support, Control-M job execution and generation of the PDFs.
  • Computing Services Branch /Midrange Computing Division — infrastructure support, performance monitoring and resolution.
  • Auditor-Controller Disbursement — primary business owner, process and data reconciliation.
Dave Wesolik is the general manager of the Internal Services Department, which encompasses four branches: App Solutions; Data Center Operations; Telecommunications Network; and Shared Technology Services.   

Dennis Noone is Executive Editor of Industry Insider. He is a career journalist, having worked at small-town newspapers and major metropolitan dailies including USA Today in Washington, D.C.