Keeping the cost of compliance small isn't the same as doing as little work into compliance as possible. More often than not, it's the other way around.

Corner cutting doesn't work on any of the usual "cost centers", and most of them can be transformed into a differential.

But even your example can be viewed as an unavoidable cost of doing business where the alternative is to not be in business. In other words there's a distinction to be made between regulatory compliance where you have no choice and automating payroll processing where you do have a choice. I think it's pretty clear we're talking about the latter and I would not categorize an internal software development team who's job is to make the business run more efficiently as a cost center, even though there's not external sales of their work products.