Less than half of HR and finance professionals in charge of payroll have any efficiency measures in place, according to research published today by ADP Employer Services.

In a week of challenging surveys, this is the latest depressing evidence that companies look for quick-fix ways of saving money (cancelled contracts, redundancies) but often ignore the entrenched areas where money is being slowly drained out of the enterprise by inefficient systems.

ADP surveyed over 750 HR and finance professionals, and found finance professionals faired worse than their HR counterparts, with only 39% measuring payroll efficiency, compared with 49% in HR. Less than one third of all respondents consider payroll expenditure (aside from staff costs) when looking to reduce costs in the business.

The research also highlighted disagreement as to where responsibility for payroll rests in the organisation: in large businesses it is more likely to fall under finance than HR (49% versus 40%), rising to 69% versus 31% in smaller companies.

Despite this reluctance to grapple with payroll inefficiencies, 63% of all organisations retain the function in house – rising to more than three-quarters of finance companies. Data control and security were cited as the main causes of the decision not to outsource.

This, of course, is the key point: nearly forty percent of IT directors have experienced data theft or leakage and see internal security as the biggest threat to the enterprise. Specialist BPO companies, whose business bedrock must be security and process expertise to survive are perhaps better placed to take the problem off CIOs hands.

While payroll might be an often overlooked area of inefficiency, it joins energy consumption as a cause of money being wasted internally because no one has the skill or the will to tackle a deeply embedded and costly problem that haemorrhages money out of the enterprise. A separate report this week finds that 37% of datacentres have no plans to measure energy efficiency, and 76% of IT professionals do not charge the business for the power used by the IT it commissions (or refuses to decommission, in the case of 'ghost servers' that are never switched off).

In a large enterprise, power consumption is directly related to IT services demand, and many of those systems remain switched on even when dormant or no longer used.

The recent European Outsourcing Association conference in central London found cancelled contracts and slashed budgets were the response to the downturn in roughly a third of delegates' companies. How many of these could save that money by tackling inefficiency on an enterprise scale, rather than hacking away at strategic investment?