Right to Work checks

Every individual that works in the UK should be asked to provide proof of their Right to Work before their employment commences. This to prevent illegal working in the UK, in line with employer guidance published by the UK Government.

Right to Work checks form part of pre-employment checks during an onboarding process and should be conducted on all prospective employees before they start work, regardless of their nationality.

Carrying out a right to work check properly will give an employer a ‘statutory excuse’, which protects them from liability if they are found to have inadvertently employed somebody who does not have the right to work in the UK.

As part of a compliant Right to Work process, an employer needs to obtain an employee’s identity documents, check that they are genuine and valid and retain a record of that check.

The documents which can be checked by an employer to establish their right to work include passports and biometric residence permits. A full list is set out in regulations on the government website.

The employer must check that the documents are genuine and that the person presenting them is the prospective employee or employee, the rightful holder and allowed to do the type of work which they are offering.

TrustID users can upload an image of a candidate’s identity document – an appropriate passport, ID card, visa or biometric residence permit – to our secure website.

The TrustID software can then authenticate the identity documents in just a few seconds. The software assesses a document’s legitimacy by checking the information held in the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) through optical character recognition. It also checks whether a document is recorded on a police watch list.

The TrustID Right to Work team confirms whether the uploaded documents give the holder an unlimited or time-limited right to work in the UK and returns a full report to the employer for their records.

The TrustID Right to Work service gives employers a robust process to ensure that every potential employee is consistently checked. It reduces the chance of offering employment to an illegal worker, protecting the employer from potential fines and fraud.

Employers upload identity documents to the TrustID cloud server using a secure, encrypted communication.

The TrustID service then reads and validates information from the documents and a human expert assesses whether they entitle the holder to work in the UK.

Once completed, the results of the assessment are recorded in a .pdf document which is returned to the employer’s account dashboard.

Employers can choose to store the records on the TrustID cloud servers for a defined period of time before downloading them for their records. During this time, records are only viewable by the employer, TrustID Document Helpdesk staff and IT administrators providing technical and maintenance support.

The default retention period is 7 days, after which the documents are automatically deleted by TrustID. Users of the TrustID service can choose to delete records manually before this period.