Right to Work - What to check and how?

Right to Work is an area that always puzzles HR departments. There are so many permutations and the rules keep changing. Below is a helpful article published in the Recruiter Magazine on November 4th, 2009. Read on..
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Companies that supply staff should be wary of the reputation risk to their clients of using staff with no right to work in the UK.
Kenneth Hanslip, head of professional standards at NSL Services, a company that provides traffic wardens (civil enforcement officers) to many local authorities, said that whenever a traffic warden was discovered to be working in the UK illegally there were stories in the press about “terrorist or Taliban traffic wardens”. This would lead to calls from concerned clients.
Other risks of employing illegal workers are a civil penalty of £10,000 per person employed as well as the risk of those individuals carrying out fraud and other criminal activity within the company, said Hanslip.
In one case, he said NSL (formerly part of National Car Parks) lost £43,000 when an accounts clerk committed fraud. “We still do not know who that accounts clerk was, because the person disappeared,” Hanslip told HR and recruitment professionals at a Symposium Events forum on Employing and Vetting Non-UK Nationals in London.
Hanslip said that around 30% of the company’s staff are foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area (EEA), with many coming from West Africa, but also Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hanslip recommended a number of actions that recruiters could take to reduce the risk of taking on staff without a legal right to work in the UK:
- close liaison with local UK Border Agency immigration teams
- regular National Insurance number payroll sweeps to identify discrepancies
- avoid temporary National Insurance numbers
- if in doubt about the authenticity of a document, seek assistance from document validation services at the UK Border Agency
- don’t take documents at face value - always speak to the person face-to-face
- don’t rely on photocopies of documents provided by the applicant, but check the original and then photocopy it yourself
- don’t assume that those with no right to work in the UK won’t target your company, or industry. People often pick out unsuspecting employers and industries to build up a work history that they can then use to get work elsewhere