Friday 29 March 2019

What fresh Hell is this?

Email from our HR department:

Annual Employee Details Form & Right to Work Check

I haven’t yet received your annual employee details form and your right to work document.

Expired passports as well as current ones can be used for this as well as other forms of right to work documents, if you are unsure please ask me.


Annual? I've been here nearly twenty years and never shown them my passport. When did this crap come in? Does everybody else have to do this?

7 comments:

Rich Tee said...

Not that specifically, but the amount of paperwork I had to complete when I temped a couple of years ago was staggering, plus a photo copy of my passport and evidence of my address.

The last time I temped in the 1990s you just filled in maybe a couple of forms. There was no identity checking.

I do blame the EU for this. It is open borders that has made the identity checking necessary, and various pieces of EU legislation like the Working Time Directive.

Shiney said...

@MW

The Gummint now don't check and dish out NI numbers to all-comers. If they didn't do that then people not entitled to work wouldn't be able to, would they? So employers have to, or get fined (£3k per transgression I belirve).

But the annual thing? That's just Gold-Plated-HR-Bollocks-On-Stilts.

Lola said...

It's the bureaucrats making brexit nasty.

Curtis said...

RT, the EU has little to do with it, it is Theresa May's anti-immigrant stance from her time at the HO and most illegal immigrants are not from the EU (because until we leave the EU, the majority of EU migrants are legal). People saying the words "open borders" often don't actually mean that. We don't have open borders with the EU, because if we did then there wouldn't be any identity checks when travelling to and from other EU countries (Ireland excepted). We have free movement for citizens of other EU countries, which means they can live in the UK by proving they are EU citizens.

Shiney, the government checks that you have the right to work at the time you apply for an NI number. However, some people's right to work is time limited (they can apply for permission again and are allowed to work while applications are pending). If you don't trust people to stop working once they are no longer allowed to, the only real way to ensure they are not working is to make employers check.

Mark Wadsworth said...

RT, the long term trend is clear. I'm not sure it's actually an EU thing though (see L and C's comments).

Sh, thanks, confirms my suspicions.

L, bureaucrats make everything nasty. I accept there has to be some form filling, but let's keep it as smooth and simple as possible (whereby there are countries far worse than the UK).

C, ta.

Shiney said...

@C

If the government checks the right to work (debatable, but I'll give you that) before issuing an NI number, and its time limited, why not state that on the NI card (like a credit card, y'now, with an expiry date), or have a different sequence, or something equally as simple.

Then RTI could just issue a warning to the employer three months before.

There, fixed it for ya.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Sh, exactly.