Making Right to Work checks easier in Facilities Management

By Tony Machin | February 2, 2017 | Customer News, Right to Work

As a Facilities Management Company, supplying cleaning, security or catering contracts, you know that you must make checks on your employees to ensure that they have the Right to Work in the UK. But if your team are spread across different sites, working for different customers, you’ll also know that making visual checks and filing copy documents can be a time-consuming challenge.

But getting ID checks right is crucial – to protect your business from expensive illegal working penalties, to ensure security at customer sites and to preserve and enhance your company’s reputation.  What’s more, the Home Office have highlighted the cleaning sector, along with construction and care, as one which they are particularly targeting as part of their clamp down on illegal working.

So how can electronic ID checking help with Right to Work compliance?

1. Electronic checks save time and easily demonstrate compliance

If you’re currently sending your staff out to check, copy and then file identity documents, a field-based, mobile ID checking service with centralised document storage could save you time and streamline your processes.

For example, with electronic ID checks, your field-based management staff could see and photograph an identity document from each applicant that they meet. And then upload it to our cloud-based checking service which quickly validates key information and returns a report confirming whether a document has passed the identity checks. You then just download the report and file it centrally as a record of who did the check and when, for audit and compliance purposes.
That’s exactly what one fast-growing commercial cleaning company in the South East decided to do when they introduced TrustID in 2017:
“As a business, we didn’t believe that we were doing anything wrong or employing people illegally – that wasn’t the issue at all. We just wanted to be sure that, if we did face a check, we could easily prove that we were carrying out the due-diligence expected”

Using an automated check can also reinforce knowledge with recruitment staff around Right to Work requirements.  For example, educating them on which passports require a visa to be checked. This avoids the need to go back to candidates requesting documents which were missed during the initial recruitment process.

2. An electronic ID check gives you confidence and helps you spot fake documents more easily

The vast majority of those seeking employment will be legal, but some of the applicants you see may be committing identity offences, such as obtaining falsified, altered or out of date passports or other forged documents, to convince you of their right to work in the UK. With candidates likely to present many types of ID documents from all over the world, spotting fake documents by eye can be a difficult process and maintaining staff training to be document experts isn’t easy.

Cleanbrite, who introduced TrustID Mobile Apps to support their Right to Work checks told us: “Our Head Office team were well trained and pretty sharp at examining ID documents, but it was no easy task to identify rogue documents and the Border Agency weren’t always able to get back to us quickly. Now, we get a decision on the ID at a click of a button. What’s more, if the team have any concerns, they can send documents to the TrustID helpdesk who are always quick to give them further advice.”

3. Advertising your electronic checks can give you a competitive advantage

In a competitive business environment, any Facilities Management business that can demonstrate a thorough and consistent validation and on-boarding process has a strong commercial advantage. As Bradley Reames, Managing Director at Peartree Cleaning Services explained to us: “Employee validation is still one of the key conversations with any client. Validation technology is a no-brainer to give our client peace of mind that we follow the proper processes and can offer the very best service.”

Using electronic checks also helps our facilities management customers to respond more quickly to new contracts or expansion of existing customer requirements as they are able to get new recruits up and running within hours, even if recruitment is done on site.

Want to find out more?

Why not find out more about how identity validation services could help your business with Right to Work checks?

Right to Work checks