As an employer, you have a legal obligation to check the right to work documentation for every employee that works for you. Currently, if you fail to have the right documentation on file for every employee that works for you, as a first offence, you could be fined £15,000 per employee who doesn’t have the right documentation on file. This fine has been in place since 2014, and we routinely check this documentation is on file for the employees of our retained clients.
This fine will be increased from £15,000 per employee to £45,000 per employee from the 1st April 2024 – that’s a whopping increase, which most SME’s would struggle to afford and imagine if this applies to more than 1 of your employees, it could be increased to £60,000 per employee, which could put some smaller SME’s out of business – scary!
I’ve personally been subjected to a random Home Office visit when I was HR Director at Harley-Davidson. Home Office officers have the right to turn up, unannounced and inspect your documentation without warning – which they did do. They asked me to print off a list of our employees and then randomly selected about 30 employees from that list and asked to see their files, which they then checked for the right to work in the UK documentation. In the meantime, I also had to swear an oath ( by reading out specific wording provided by them) to state that I wouldn’t hide anything from them. Trust me, this was a daunting experience, and I felt guilty even though I knew I had done nothing wrong, and we had everything in place! We passed the audit with flying colours, but this was a nerve wracking experience and the importance of getting this right as a result of this experience has stayed with me ever since!
We want to make sure that you can have peace of mind that you have everything in place, and that if you do have that surprise visit like I did, that you don’t need to worry! The details of our Right to Work in the UK Audit and cost of the audit are outlined in the PDF here.
If you’d like to book a Right to Work in the UK Audit, then please get in touch: help@merakihr.com or book your audit with us: here
