Hundreds of Thousands of Tax Credits a Month, Zero Manual Keying: How Navtech Rebuilt RetroTax for Scale

The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) gives US employers up to $9,600 for each eligible hire from targeted groups, such as veterans, SNAP recipients, and the long-term unemployed. To claim it, an employer has to screen every new hire and file IRS Form 8850 and ETA Form 9061 with the state workforce agency within 28 days of the start date. Miss the window or get the data wrong, and the credit is gone.

There’s no single place to file. Every state runs its own portal, with its own rules, validations, and backlog, and most offer no API.

That’s the problem RetroTax solves. A family-owned tax credit administrator based in Indianapolis, RetroTax has helped US employers uncover and claim WOTC, the Federal Empowerment Zone (FEZ) credit, and other federal and state incentives since 1996. It handles the paperwork, so employers simply collect the credit.

Today, RetroTax processes hundreds of thousands of new WOTC applications every month. New-hire data flows in directly from clients’ HR systems, qualified applications are filed with the right state automatically, and decisions flow back on their own.

The payoff? No manual keying into state portals, paperless client onboarding, and a SOC 2 Type II compliance that turned data security into a selling point.

In 2015, RetroTax ran on two legacy systems, built on technology such as ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server, that didn’t talk to each other. Development was slow and almost entirely reactive, and around 80% of the team’s time went to putting out fires instead of building new features.

Whole departments did by hand what software could have done. They uploaded new hires in bulk, keyed applications into state portals, and retrieved decisions from state workforce agencies one by one. As volume grew, performance suffered, and the team never had the bandwidth to automate any of it.

Meanwhile, the market was moving. WOTC screening was becoming a step inside employers’ onboarding systems and applicant tracking systems (ATS). Competitors already integrated with those platforms were winning RetroTax’s prospects and pulling away existing clients. RetroTax had no way to connect to its clients’ HR software, so every new employer meant custom data handling and slow onboarding. Some clients were still onboarding on paper and by fax.

Security was the other wall. WOTC data includes Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and public assistance status. RetroTax’s security policies weren’t consistently implemented, and it had no monitoring in place. Major customers,as well as HR and payroll platforms won’t share employee data without independent assurance, which in practice means a SOC 2 report.

RetroTax had to rebuild the platform behind a business that dates back to 1996 while continuing to serve every client it had.

Navtech began with smaller projects before taking on the full rebuild. Along the way, it introduced two-week sprints, fixed release dates, and a structured delivery process. Just as important, the team took the time to learn a business that’s genuinely hard to learn: a niche federal tax program, run under different rules in every state.

Navtech’s leadership flew to the US and walked through every department at RetroTax, mapping each process to find what could be automated. RetroTax’s leadership made the trip the other way, visiting the Hyderabad team at least once a year.

With that understanding in place, the decision was clear: rewrite. Navtech retired one of the two legacy systems and rebuilt its functions into RetroTax’s core platform on Ruby on Rails. It moved the data from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, masking sensitive fields such as Social Security numbers and passwords along the way. The new platform was designed API-first, meaning other software could connect to it directly, so it could plug straight into onboarding and applicant tracking systems. A dedicated Navtech team spent a full year on the rebuild.

Getting data in came first. Navtech built direct integrations with HR platforms, including PrismHR, BambooHR, WorkBright, Namely, and JazzHR, turning every new hire into one standard application record. Integration traffic runs on AWS serverless infrastructure, so heavy volumes never slow down RetroTax’s core platform, and RetroTax pays only for what it uses. Location mapping places each new hire under the right client location, and an alert flags any location the system hasn’t seen before.

Clients without an HR system use Webscreen, a client-facing site Navtech built for enrolling employees directly. Bulk uploads by CSV are automated, and for clients still on paper, an optical character recognition (OCR) engine reads handwritten forms and fills in the application.

Filing is automated. Inside the platform, every employee sits in a clear hierarchy of client, company, location, and batch, and screening rules decide who qualifies. Qualified applications go to automation scripts that log in to each state portal, enter or upload the application, and handle that portal’s quirks. The same automation retrieves certifications and denials from the states and writes them back into RetroTax’s records, closing the loop without anyone checking portals by hand.

The design principle is simple: build once and reuse across HR platforms and state portals. A new HR platform means a new connector. A state changing its portal means updating one script. The core pipeline doesn’t change. Salesforce Service Cloud dashboards sit on top for performance tracking and automated client reporting.

Navtech also led RetroTax’s journey to SOC 2 Type II, the security standard set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The team drafted every required policy and procedure, put endpoint protection, device management, and continuous monitoring in place across RetroTax’s AWS environment, and set up ongoing tracking of its security controls. Then it guided RetroTax through its first SOC 2 audit and on to Type II compliance.

Under the hood, Ruby on Rails runs the core platform, Python powers the filing automation and OCR, Node.js handles the HR integrations, and React drives the client dashboards, all on AWS with MySQL.

The rebuild did more than modernize RetroTax’s software. It kept the business competitive and gave it an edge over rivals. RetroTax went after onboarding and applicant tracking platforms before the window closed, and every new integration brought in leads and clients it wouldn’t otherwise have reached.

The operational gains followed:

• 25% faster tax credit processing.
• 25% higher overall operational efficiency.
• 50% more performance reports generated.
• Fully paperless client onboarding.

Automated filing protects the 28-day window, which protects the credit, the core value RetroTax sells. And because the scripts do the keying, volume can grow without headcount growing in step.

SOC 2 Type II changed the sales conversation. Certification met the requirements of a major customer, and security review stopped being a blocker and became a credential. It helped RetroTax win new customers and grow revenue and it made risk and control monitoring more efficient.

The partnership mattered as much as the code. Navtech learned RetroTax’s business department by department, and that understanding shaped every automation decision.

RetroTax’s platform predates generative AI, but it already has what AI needs to work in a regulated business: direct integrations with the HR platforms its clients use, SOC 2 Type II controls around sensitive employee data, and automation running at hundreds of thousands of applications a month. That’s the foundation Navtech builds AI on.