Washington Employment Security Department Realizes Electronic Tax & Wage Solution

With a new, efficient solution in place, the department is able to reduce processing time by three to four weeks each quarter, and realize labor savings of approximately ten full-time staff members.

The Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) processes unemployment tax reports from approximately 197,000 employers, who submit quarterly wage detail documents for 3.2 million employees. The Department’s primary responsibility is to process unemployment benefits. Before automation efforts, ESD relied heavily on manual data entry processes. It was a labor-intensive, costly effort to process and verify each quarter’s tax and wage reports. ESD turned to a document imaging and workflow management solution for automated tax and wage form processing to increase data integrity, save labor costs and reduce processing time.

The ImageSource® Solution
The Employment Security Department now creates digital images of all incoming wage and tax documents. Documents are stored as digital images in a fully integrated document archive and retrieval system. The solution was designed and incorporated by ImageSource, a leading integrator of Enterprise Content Management solutions. For content storage, retrieval and workflow, ImageSource utilized Oracle|Stellent Imaging and Process Management (IPM). ImageSource’s ILINX Release Script was used to provide superior functionality between Kofax Ascent® Capture—implemented for image scanning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and data validation—and the IPM platform. Another Kofax product, INDICIUS, was used in conjunction with Ascent Capture, extending it’s capabilities. INDICIUS’s powerful recognition engine extracts hand-written and machine-printed data, bar codes, check boxes and tabular data, eliminating costly and time consuming manual document processing steps. Highly customizable, ImageSource configured the OCR module to recognize specific data, form types and Tax & Wage information. An ImageSource designed, custom user interface allows the user to complete business rule checking to ensure quality data. Handwritten data on incoming forms can be automatically and accurately collected for database use and transaction processing. Prior to the ImageSource solution, approximately 90 percent, or more, of all data on forms was being entered manually. With the improved OCR processes, manual data entry has been reduced to less than 10 percent. Tax and wage data is electronically recognized utilizing OCR from the image files and is automatically entered into a back-end SQL database. The data is then scrubbed, verified and indexed before being uploaded to the IBM mainframe that manages the tax accounting and benefit systems for ESD. A content addressable EMC® Centera enterprise storage platform has also been implemented by ImageSource to support long-term and secure content storage.

"We have users state-wide retrieving documents from the system. Because we wanted the data that goes to the mainframe to be as clean as possible, we rely heavily on the workflow tools as we verify and make changes to the records."– Cinda Sackrison Unemployment Insurance Tax and Wage Technology Manager

The Bottom Line
Having digital images readily available enables the Employment Security Department staff to quickly validate information. Business rules set up within Oracle|Stellent IPM alert Department staff whenever there is questionable information. The workflow rules automatically route those red flagged tax and wage reports to exception queues for review and further analysis. Because the scanned documents are indexed, staff throughout the state can quickly pull up and review the original material submitted by employers. There are currently over 300 staff members that have access to the Oracle|Stellent images. Each quarter the Employment Security Department can now get all of the information into the system three or four weeks earlier without requiring employees to put in overtime. By eliminating overtime and reducing manual data entry, ESD has seen a significant labor costs savings and an increase in data integrity. Ultimately, this enables ESD to provide better service to Washington employers and unemployment insurance claimants.