In order to prevent illegal working in the UK, all employers – no matter what industry they’re in or what business they run – have to carry out right to work checks on prospective employees to ensure that they’re not disqualified from doing the job in question because of their immigration status.
All potential members of staff should be asked to demonstrate their right to work. You can do this via the Home Office online right to working service, carrying out a manual document check or by using the services of an IDSP. Make sure that every individual is given a reasonable opportunity to prove their right to work so you can’t be accused of discrimination.
To avoid discrimination issues and give yourself complete peace of mind, make sure you’re consistent in how these checks are carried out, even when dealing with British citizens.
Also make sure that job selections are made based on individual suitability for the role and make sure that you don’t discourage or exclude prospective applicants, directly or indirectly, because of perceived or known-about protected characteristics.
For anyone with time-limited permission to work in the UK, you will need to carry out follow-up checks either on or before their permission expires. This will protect you against inadvertently employing someone who doesn’t have the right to work, as well as serving as a deterrent against those thinking about overstaying.
Note that if a staff member isn’t able to provide evidence that they are allowed to continue working, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they no longer have permission. In this instance, you can get in touch with a UK Visas and Immigration Resolution Centre or the Home Office online immigration status service for further help and advice.
There are serious sanctions in place that apply when illegal working is identified. If you’re found employing someone illegally without having carried out the prescribed checks, you may be hit with a civil penalty of up to £60,000 per worker.
It is also possible that you could be given a prison sentence of up to five years, as well as an unlimited fine. Your business could be closed, you could be disqualified as a company director, you may not be able to sponsor migrants and earnings may be seized as a result, as well.
Get the job done with applicant tracking systems
There’s a significant amount of paperwork involved with ensuring that employees have the right to work and it can be easy to get bogged down with it all, particularly if you have a workforce above a certain size.
Monitoring everything and ensuring that you’re fulfilling your responsibilities, remaining compliant with the rules and regulations, is difficult and time-consuming, with the propensity for human error relatively high.
But you can support business compliance and make your life easier by using applicant tracking systems, software that does all the hard work for you, sending out alerts when action needs to be taken, automating many of the processes and making general recruitment significantly easier as a result.
If you’d like to find out more about this kind of technology and how it could benefit your business, get in touch with the AXLR8 team today.