Payroll Specialist II

The City of Des Moines is seeking an experienced Payroll Specialist to play a critical role in ensuring our employees are paid accurately, on time, and in compliance with ever changing laws and regulations. This role has an opportunity to collaborate with various department professionals (Finance, HR, and IT) to improve processes and solve complex challenges while providing exceptional customer service.

The Payroll Specialist II will have a meaningful impact on the services that support the people who serve our community every day.

Under the general direction of the Finance Director, this role collaborates closely with the Human Resources Division to oversee and enhance the City's payroll function. The Payroll Specialist II is responsible for processing semi‑monthly payroll, ensuring compliance with all applicable employment laws and accounting standards, managing technical payroll duties, and developing processes that promote accurate and efficient payroll operations.

This position also acts as the power user and administrator for the Executime Time and Attendance system, ensuring the system is configured to comply with state and federal laws, relevant regulations, and applicable policies. Key responsibilities include configuring, maintaining, upgrading, testing, and training for the City's payroll system. The role involves working with both complex manual and automated payroll processes, applying union contracts and policy language, and interpreting benefit deductions, tax with holdings, specialty pays, and shift conversions with considerable judgment and confidentiality.

While the primary focus is on payroll, this position also ensures accurate input of benefits into vendor portals, manages the reconciliation of benefit payments, and handles additional accounting duties as assigned.

This position demands a high level of reasoning, confidentiality, and a strong ability to provide exceptional customer service and work collaboratively with various stakeholders. This is a more advanced role than a Payroll Specialist I due to its leadership responsibilities and complexity.

This is the second classification in a series of two. This classification is distinguished from the Payroll Specialist I in that the duties and responsibilities are more complex and technical in nature, and thus require a higher degree of initiative and independence. Positions in this class perform responsible and specialized payroll and record‑keeping as a primary assignment, with the added responsibility of being a power user and system administrator for the time and attendance module, ensuring its optimal configuration and functionality.

Incumbents may perform other accounting and financial record keeping and business office administrative support work. Incumbents are expected to have understanding of the City's payroll‑personnel system and accounting system at a level necessary to understand the relationship of their work to the total system. Incumbents are expected to work with a high level of independence in performing assigned payroll functions.

In addition, incumbents are expected to use sound judgement and initiative to resolve payroll problems and to problem‑solve when changes in processes, procedures and or state/federal or City compensation and benefit packages necessitate changes in procedures.

• Performs timely and accurate preparation of City semi‑monthly payrolls in close collaboration with Human Resources and Information Technology.
• Researches, gathers, tabulates, assembles, analyzes, summarizes, and reconciles payroll transactions, related information, and records; reviews and monitors timesheet data for compliance with collective bargaining agreements, City policies, and applicable laws; identifies and resolves discrepancies as authorized; certifies payroll and benefit eligibility; and updates required systems.
• Administers payroll operations in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations, collective bargaining agreements, City policies, and benefit plan requirements by monitoring changes, interpreting…