Can you afford not to be confident in your Right to Work checks?

Published May 2024

Written by Alina Howe-Jones

Alina is a highly accomplished consultant with over 25 years' experience within onboarding and background screening; working with many well-respected industry data suppliers including Experian's own propriety data, to improve screening both in the UK and globally.

How do you feel about your recruitment process?

Are you confident you are not only conducting Right to Work (RTW) checks in line with legislation, but can also provide the correct evidence to support that? Is the time it takes to onboard a candidate creating a poor experience, or worse, are you losing the best candidates because you’re taking too long?

The changes to allow recruiters to conduct Right to Work checks face to face or remotely give more ways to carry out RTW checks, however, can you be confident in relying on an digital service identity provider (IDSP) and identity validation technology to get a legal statutory excuse for their employee?

In February 2024 the UK Government implemented changes to the Right to Work legislation as well as a significant increase in civil penalty fines for employing illegal workers.

The changes will mean that businesses employing a worker without the appropriate right to work will be liable to pay fines starting at £45,000 per worker – up from the £15,000 penalty that previously could be levied for a first breach. Repeat offenders can anticipate fines of £60,000 per illegal worker they employ^[1]. You need to review and, if necessary, update the procedures you have in place to ensure employees have a ‘right to work’ in the UK.

Right to Work Checks Get complete control and visibility over all your Right to Work checks Find out more

What do you need to do?

If you can’t answer any of these questions confidently then this is the time to take a proactive approach and review and refresh your Right to Work process.

Questions to ask yourself:

Am I conducting an Imposter Check for remote RTW checks?
Am I using all the tools available to me to reduce the risks associated with conducting checks manually?
Do I have the correct and accurate records in case of an audit?
Can I obtain a statutory excuse if the candidate does not have a valid UK Passport?
Do my existing employees still have the right to work in the UK?
Is my RTW process taking too much time for my team or my candidates?

How we can help

We can help you answer these questions more confidently, using technology to drive consistent, efficient and fully auditable checks.

Incorporating state of the art document validation and facial recognition technology, our Right to Work App not only helps you to conduct compliant Right to Work checks, but it validates that the documents provided by the candidate are valid and their own.

Watch our recent webinar, with guest speakers from the UK Border Agency and Home Office, where we discussed our obligations, what the future holds for Right to Work checks and how digitisation has landed in market.