Did you know that employers who hire “high-risk” employees can take advantage of significant tax credits from state governments? Yep. Who are “high-risk” employees? These are defined as recipients of public assistance, youths, or ex-felons. When employers bring these people into their workforce, they are doing society a favor, and as such, are rewarded in the form of tax credits.
It’s called the “Work Opportunity Tax Credit” (WOTC) program, and we at Adeptia got involved with it when the State of Illinois’ Department of Employment Security (IDES) contacted us to help them with their backlog of WOTC applications — a backlog that was quite literally, a room filled floor-to-ceiling with row upon row of cardboard boxes, all of them in turn filled with.… paper. You read that right…PAPER applications. There were 180,000 pieces of paper in that room collecting dust, representing years of applications that had still to undergo processing.
With our help, IDES went from using summer interns to manually process applications to having an automated, online portal where employers could submit WOTC applications. In just the second quarter of 2015 alone, IDES processed 174,393 WOTC applications using the Adeptia platform, saving Illinois businesses $256 million dollars in the form of tax credits. Now who says the government doesn’t do good things for business? (wink)
To learn more about how we helped IDES eliminate their entire backlog and process 10x as many applications without any concomitant increase in staff, check out our case study here.