Dependent Verification – Own Your Benefits Compliance

Compliance creeps into almost all areas of business – it can be hard to keep track of it all and manage it efficiently. Workday continually pushes to increase compliance capability and within the recent releases, this capability extended to the benefits module to expand dependent compliance with the new verification functionality and tracking. 

Dependent verification is essential to ensure your company is fully compliant with your benefit vendor’s requirements, eligibility, and to make sure your employees are only paying for eligible dependents on their benefit plans. This new functionality proves to be valuable, as dependent verification used to be something managed outside of the tenant – with a few setup steps, you can verify your dependents right within the benefits workflow! Here are some items to consider to enhance your Dependent Verification Configuration: 

1. Consider Adding to Benefit Business Processes

When implementing the Dependent Verification Functionality, you may be tempted to only use the task Manage Dependent Verification Status, where you can view and update the status of existing dependents en masse. While this new delivered task can be useful and adding additional steps to the benefits workflow may sound unappealing, it’s one of the best ways to tackle verification at the source: when employees are changing their benefits.

The step on the business process comes with a delivered condition rule and looks at whether the dependent is part of a benefits package. However, there are great ways to minimize this step if you don’t want it firing off every time, such as adding a condition rule on the step to only fire if there is a new dependent added during the benefit event. 

Adding this step onto the Benefit Business Processes allows you to take full ownership and control of dependent verification within your tenant the moment the dependent is entered into the system, helping you maintain compliance and proving to be less maintenance down the line. 

2. Load in Historical Verifications with an EIB

So you rolled out the new dependent verification to the benefit workflow for all new dependents added. What about all the dependents that were already in the tenant with no status?

While the new Manage Dependent Verification Status task allows you to update statuses – including those with no status – an EIB may be a more efficient option if you have already been tracking dependent verification outside the system or if your dependents don’t all have the same verification details, including dates and notes.

Using the Edit Dependent web service to update verification status is easy! The dependent verification columns are at the very end of the EIB file and allow you to load in all historical dependent verification data with different dates and comments for each dependent, something you wouldn’t be able to do with the mass update task. Additionally, it’s a much cleaner way in terms of data accuracy and historical record keeping for the existing dependents in your tenant. 

3. Compliance YOUR way!

You don’t need much to get this functionality up and running in your tenant on the bare bones, but there are so many ways to customize dependent verification and tailor it to your specific business needs! 

Since the domains and business process policy must be enabled for dependent verification, consider who on the approval chain should be reviewing the dependent verifications on the business process. If something doesn’t look right once this step comes to them, send it back to the employee requesting additional documentation or corrections! Want the business process step to fire off for everyone during Open Enrollment, but only for newly added dependents during the life event? Does your vendor request verification of dependent statuses for benefit plans and rates? No problem! New reporting capabilities for dependent verification make it easy to pull in your benefit groups, plans enrolled, their dependents, and their verification status details on reports. 

For those of you who have been or are still tracking dependent verification for benefits outside of the Workday system, what are you waiting for? Reach out to Kognitiv and we’ll assist in getting this functionality set up and rolled out in your tenant to suit your needs. Own your benefits compliance and workflow!