How one payroll systems analyst solved a 50-state compliance problem with configuration instead of code

Every payroll cycle, a paycheck has to be right for tens of thousands of workers, and "right" is a moving target. Under US labor law an employer must pay at least the minimum wage for every hour worked, and more than one minimum wage can apply to the same hour. The federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 an hour. A state can set its own higher rate. A city or county can set one higher still. Whichever is largest is the one the employer legally owes, and each of those numbers changes on its own schedule. For a company running payroll across all fifty states, that is not a spreadsheet problem. It is a standing legal exposure, because paying a worker even slightly under the rate that applies to them can lead to lawsuits and penalties.

When you consider the amount of effort that goes into creating solutions to this type of problem, Rajagopal Arputham Chetty (senior Workday systems analyst for payroll at a major USA fitness and hospitality company) has made a career of determining that this type of problem should be resolved once and left alone. In January 2026, he authored a peer-reviewed paper detailing a method to calculate and apply automatic minimum wage top ups to over 40,000 employee records using the Workday Payroll Calculation Model. This method is also available for use by other payroll teams.

Mr. Chetty addressed a very specific area. Workday, the cloud-based platform his employer utilizes, supplies the federal and state mandated minimum wage rates, however, it does not supply the local layer, the city and county rates which frequently are greater than the state floor. Furthermore, while the Workday Compensation tool will increase a pay rate, it will increase all pay rates for a given state simultaneously. However, it lacks the ability to account for the exceptions created by local regulations. These are the areas where underpayment occurs and where Mr. Chetty chose to address this issue.

The manner in which Mr. Chetty approached this issue appears more akin to good plumbing than programming. He developed an effective dated lookup table to store the current minimum wage rate for each locality. Utilizing a lookup function, the system will pull the correct rate based upon the last date of the pay period, therefore ensuring that the system will utilize the rate that was applicable during that time frame. Next, an aggregate function will compare the federal, state, and local minimum wage rates and select the higher of the three. At this juncture, simple arithmetic completes the process: multiply the number of hours worked by the appropriate rate and subtract what the employee has been previously paid. If there is a deficiency, it will become a minimum wage adjustment earning which will be applied to the employee's current paycheck.

While each component of Mr. Chetty's methodology is individually not innovative, the combination of these components utilizing only pre-existing functions within the platform is the source of innovation. "One of the key advantages of the model is that it utilized the SaaS solution functionality provided by Workday and did not include any out-of-the-box technology," Mr. Chetty stated in the paper. As a result of the design being contained within the platform's framework, there is nothing to upgrade or migrate in the future and all prior pay periods' calculations remain accessible for auditing purposes post-factum.

The benefits associated with Mr. Chetty's methodology are evident in who is able to execute it. Once the engine has been configured, adding additional locations or increasing a rate may be executed solely by a payroll user through configuration changes. "Any additions to regions and minimum wages are configurable by Payroll Users without requiring assistance or expertise from IT," stated Mr. Chetty. This represents a significant improvement relative to many payroll customization implementations that fail to operate properly subsequent to legislation changes and subsequently require developers to update their code to comply with the new laws. With respect to Mr. Chetty's methodology, increasing rates is merely data entry, not a project.

As indicated in the case study presented in conjunction with Mr. Chetty's published paper, the engine is currently operational in production processing minimum wage adjustments for over 40 thousand employees located throughout all fifty states in the United States, and Mr. Chetty reported no errors have occurred in its operation.

Mr. Chetty's approach is indicative of a broader theme within his body of work. Prior to this publication, he had architected an income tax engine embedded within an enterprise resource planning product, receiving recognition internally via a domain expert award. Since that time, he has published another companion paper extending the configuration first thinking methodology to commissioned employees whose variable pay can be just as likely to decrease below the federally required threshold. In both methodologies, Mr. Chetty has consistently followed a similar procedure: model the rule once, make it durable, hand control over to those who use it every day.

This philosophy provides a tangible competitive advantage for an industry under continuous regulatory scrutiny. Minimum wage legislation in the United States continues to grow increasingly complex annually as new local ordinances and scheduled increases occur on parallel timelines. Employers become non-compliant by treating compliance as a one-time setup, whereas employers maintain compliancy status by treating compliance as an effective-dated, self-updating system. Mr. Chetty's published design provides payroll teams with a concrete blueprint for achieving this status.

Ultimately, Mr. Chetty has continued to demonstrate in print and in production that the most difficult compliance problems do not always require new technology. Frequently, they only require someone willing to effectively use existing tools so that the problem does not continue to reappear.