In an effort to streamline UCLA’s process for making payments to foreign employees, students and other foreign individuals (foreign individuals), and assure UCLA’s compliance with its institutional tax withholding and reporting obligations, Corporate Financial Services (CFS) has recently conducted an internal process improvement review of UCLA’s non-resident alien payment process. While this process is largely driven by complex immigration and tax laws for which the University has no control, CFS is intent on simplifying this process in 2006, not only for the benefit of departmental personnel requesting such payments, but for the benefit of our foreign individuals.

To assist with this effort, CFS, in partnership with the Graduate Division, has recently purchased, and is currently testing, a new on-line tax compliance system named “Glacier”. Once Glacier is implemented, campus departments, as well as their foreign individuals, will spend less time mastering the procedures and paperwork required to substantiate a foreign individual’s tax status prior to payment. Implementation is targeted for sometime in 2006. 

So what is Glacier and how will it work?

Glacier is a software program designed to collect tax-related information from foreign individuals via a secure internet site and analyze that data to automatically determine the individual’s tax status, treaty eligibility and tax withholding rate for federal income tax purposes.

After Glacier is implemented at UCLA, foreign individuals will no longer be required to manually complete the UC W-8BEN form, or other tax-related forms in order to receive a payment of taxable income (e.g., wages, fellowship, or honoraria). Instead, foreign individuals will be assigned a unique Glacier password and instructed via email to log onto Glacier’s secure web site via the internet from anywhere in the world in order to provide UCLA with their tax-related information needed for payment.

Once the foreign individual has completed all the required information within Glacier (which is similar to the information contained on the UC W-8BEN), Glacier will:

•     Determine the individual’s tax status for federal income tax purposes;

•     Review applicable income tax treaties to determine whether the individual could potentially  qualify for an income tax treaty;

•     Display the text of the income tax treaty should the individual wish to review;

•     Complete and print all applicable income tax treaty exemption (e.g., Form 8233) and/or tax withholding forms (e.g., Form W-4) for the individual’s signature;

•     Prepare a checklist for the individual containing all forms and immigration documents that must be returned to UCLA prior to payment;

•     Generate a “Tax Summary Report” (see illustration on page 3) for the individual indicating (i) the results of Glacier’s determinations, (ii) clarification of the terms and requirements referenced in Glacier, (iii) instructions on who to contact at UCLA for questions, and (iv) instructions on how to update information if there are future changes;

•     Send an automatic email notification to UCLA that the individual has successfully completed the tax information collection process in Glacier;

•     Generate standard and ad hoc reports, including income tax treaty exemption dates, residency status change dates, missing SSN/ITINs, immigration expiration dates, etc., so UCLA won’t miss important dates;

•     Automatically send out email notifications to individuals when updates need to be made to their Glacier records;

•     Prepare year-end tax Form 1042-S for foreign individuals on paper or electronically for easy access by the foreign individual;

•     Prepare year-end tax Forms 1042 and 1042-S for submission to the Internal Revenue Service.

How will campus departments and foreign individuals benefit from Glacier?

By now, it may be clear that moving to an automated process via Glacier will improve UCLA’s institutional ability to better manage it compliance requirements when making payments to foreign individuals. We also believe Glacier will provide the following specific benefits to campus departments and foreign individuals once Glacier is implemented:

•     Department personnel will no longer be responsible for determining a foreign individual’s tax status, treaty exemption eligibility or tax rates because such determinations will be automatically performed by Glacier. This should not only reduce potential tax exposure to departments that inadvertently make inaccurate tax determinations, but free up valuable resources that were previously used to learn complex tax rules in order to determine tax residency;

•     Department personnel should also see a significant reduction in the amount of time spent workingwith foreign payees to complete complex tax forms or answer tax-related questions since Glacier provides On-line Help on each screen as well as a Telephone Support Center should foreign individuals have questions while completing their Glacier information;

•     Departments should also see a reduction in the processing time for payments to foreign individuals since:

(i)   Individuals will be able to begin entering their tax information into Glacier from their home country so UCLA will be able to determine their expected tax status prior to their arrival in the U.S.; and

(ii)  Manually completed paper forms will no longer be returned to the departments for revision due to incomplete or inaccurate information. This is because Glacier automatically mandates completion of all relevant information and has built in programming controls to prevent input errors and inconsistencies. Legibility will also be improved since Glacier will prepare and print all necessary forms, eliminating rework for individuals with less than perfect writing.

CFS and the Graduate Division will be communicating with campus departments in the near future to provide additional information and solicit feedback regarding Glacier and our implementation plans. In the interim, please check out Glacier’s web site www.arcticintl.com/glacier.htm for more detailed information about Glacier’s features, including its security features.  You may also contact Gayelea Allison in Payroll Services at ext.4-8728 or gallison@finance.ucla.edu, if you have specific questions unanswered by the Glacier web site.