Connected Compliance Workflows Reveal Hidden Insight, Savings, and New Opportunities
Currently, 17 states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring employers to provide paid sick leave, and rules vary widely on accrual, caps and rollover. That’s one example of the broader shift: compliance obligations are expanding, overlapping, and changing quickly right down to the worker level.
In the old world, compliance success was defined as meeting obligations and avoiding visible failures. But that model assumed the work could stay mostly manual, mostly siloed, and mostly reactive.
The new reality is different. Compliance work has outgrown fragmented tools and reactive processes and leaders are simultaneously consolidating technology, tightening budgets, and demanding measurable outcomes from operations. In that environment, “value” in compliance isn’t a sales concept. It’s an operating result: fewer downstream corrections, less rework, more predictability, and more capacity.
What’s newly possible is a compliance operating system approach that reduces the hidden costs of fragmentation and unlocks value across workflows—not just within a single task or module.
Why compliance value is often invisible
In many organizations, the highest compliance costs aren’t line items. They show up as:
Time spent reconciling mismatched worker data across systems
Manual monitoring for changes, deadlines and exceptions
Late-stage cleanup when issues are discovered downstream
Operational disruption when problems reach agencies or employees first
Redundant tools and overlapping vendors that accumulate over time
That’s why compliance can feel like a cost center even when teams are doing heroic work. The operating model itself creates unnecessary work.
What “compounding value” actually means
Compounding value occurs when multiple connected compliance workflows reveal new insights and opportunities for savings and efficiencies that would not be visible when they operate independently. Meaning: each additional workflow added to a single holistic system increases the value of the whole.
In a fragmented environment, every workflow is forced to solve the same problems independently: gather worker details, validate accuracy, interpret jurisdictional rules, track deadlines, and manage exceptions. The same worker context is duplicated, siloed and out of sync—so downstream tasks get harder, not easier.
In a unified model built on a common data foundation, worker-level context is shared across workflows. That means each workflow doesn’t start from scratch—and insights can be generated across the system, not locked inside one module. This is where value compounds:
Less rework because downstream workflows inherit consistent worker context instead of upstream inconsistencies.
Earlier prevention because connected visibility makes it possible to surface risks before they become penalties, corrections or employee-impacting issues.
More consistent execution across locations because rules and requirements can be managed systematically rather than as one-off patches.
Hidden opportunities become visible when connected data patterns reveal eligibility triggers (for example, certain hiring-related tax credits or other incentives that can be missed when workflows are disconnected).
A concrete example of why this matters: new tax treatments and incentives can create both obligations and upside - but only if organizations can track the right details consistently across locations and workflows.
ADP’s HR Trends and Priorities for 2026 report notes employers can now deduct 40% of certain child-care benefit expenses up to $500,000 (previously 25% up to $150,000), and dependent care contribution limits increase in 2026. These are the kinds of changes that expose the gap between “we know the rule changed” and “we can actually operationalize it accurately across the organization.”
What this means for leaders
Leaders should shift from viewing compliance as a set of tasks to viewing it as a system that can either drain capacity—or multiply it.
Meg Ferrero, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at ADP, offers a useful frame here: when juggling multiple, sometimes conflicting laws, it can be a struggle to maintain consistency, yet “it’s often possible to develop a standard, focused on the employees’ rights and best practices, that can work in most circumstances and allow you to have a consistent approach.”
In practice, this means leaders should expect more from their operating model:
Connected workflows that reduce duplicated work and reconciliation
Unified visibility that helps prioritize, forecast and improve compliance health
Proactive, intelligence-backed guidance that helps prevent downstream cost
A system that gets more valuable as more workflows are added—because value compounds through unification, not through more manual effort
Reduce the hidden cost of fragmentation and unlock compounding value as compliance workflows unite. ADP SmartCompliance® is designed to bring worker-level data, connected workflows, AI-powered insights, and embedded expertise together into a single operating system across the entire worker lifecycle.
