An immigration audit can help identify and resolve areas of immigration non-compliance in your organisation, to avoid Home Office scrutiny and penalties.

What are an employer’s immigration duties?

The Home Office regime for the Prevention of Illegal Working imposes mandatory duties on all UK employers. Where the Home Office establishes a breach of these duties, the employer becomes exposed to the civil penalty scheme, potential criminal sanctions and restrictions on sponsoring non-EEA nationals to work in the UK.

It is essential for UK organisations to ensure they have the required evidence of employees’ right to work on file, and that HR systems and processes are compliant.

If you do not seek the proper permission to employ workers from overseas, as well as undertake all prescribed documentation checks, you are liable for fines of up to £20,000 per worker and, in some cases, even imprisonment.

In addition, organiations who hold a UK sponsor licence are subject to further stringent compliance requirements as part of their sponsorship licence duties.

What we can do to help

HS Legal Solicitors’ immigration audit services can greatly ease the burden of ensuring that your company is, and remains, compliant with all immigration requirements.

As a team of immigration lawyers and former Home Office employees, we have an established reputation for conducting immigration audits and advising employers on compliance with their duties.

As part of our audit and compliance service, we consider a number of different aspects of compliance, which include:

• Right to Work document checking systems and processes – which documents are acceptable, when documents are checked, how copies are annotated and stored and diarising further required checks.

• Processes to avoid discrimination whilst complying with Prevention of Illegal Working requirements.

• Systems addressing immigration requirements such as permitted working hours for students on Tier 4 visas.

• Systems addressing sponsorship requirements such as minimum skill levels, minimum salary levels and advertising a vacancy to settled workers first.

• Systems addressing a sponsor licence holder’s duty to report to the Home Office events relating to the sponsored migrants’ employment and circumstances and on certain changes to the business itself.

Where appropriate we will provide sample documentation and suggest changes and suggestions as to how systems can be improved.