Right to Work compliance does not end at onboarding. Employers need robust systems for follow-up checks, record keeping, ownership and workforce changes.
Ask most HR teams whether their organisation conducts Right to Work checks and the answer will almost certainly be yes.
There is usually a process. Someone in Recruitment or HR obtains the relevant information, the check is completed, evidence is retained and the employee starts work.
The difficulty is that having a Right to Work process is not necessarily the same as having an effective Right to Work compliance programme.
Many compliance failures do not occur because an organisation has completely ignored its obligations. They happen because a check was carried out incorrectly, evidence was not retained properly, a follow-up check was missed, responsibility became unclear or the organisation’s processes failed to keep pace with changes to an employee’s immigration status.
For HR and Global Mobility leaders, this distinction matters.
Under the UK’s prevention of illegal working regime, employers can currently face a civil penalty of up to £60,000 for each illegal worker where the required checks have not been correctly carried out. The consequences can extend beyond the financial penalty and may include criminal sanctions in serious cases and implications for an organisation’s ability to sponsor migrant workers. The current £60,000 maximum is confirmed by GOV.UK.
But the bigger question for employers should not simply be whether they can avoid a penalty.
It should be whether their organisation can confidently demonstrate that every person working for it has been checked correctly and that the process will continue to work as the workforce changes.
Businesses looking to review their processes can find more information about our Employment Verification & Right to Work Checks service.
The danger of assuming that a check has been done
Right to Work compliance can create a false sense of security because the process appears straightforward.
An employee provides evidence of their status. HR records that a check has been completed. A copy is placed on file. Job done.
Except that the legal protection available to an employer depends on the prescribed check being carried out correctly.
When the Home Office requirements are followed, the employer can establish what is known as a statutory excuse against liability for a civil penalty if it is subsequently discovered that the person did not have permission to undertake the work in question.
That makes the quality of the check important, not simply the existence of a document labelled “Right to Work”.
For example, where an online check is required, simply obtaining a share code from an employee is not the check. The employer must use the appropriate Home Office service and retain the required evidence of the result.
Similarly, holding immigration documents on an employee file does not necessarily demonstrate that the prescribed process was followed at the correct time.
The important question for HR leaders is therefore not:
“Do we collect Right to Work evidence?”
It is:
“Could we demonstrate that every check was conducted correctly if we were asked to do so tomorrow?”
That is a much higher standard.
Employers looking for a step-by-step overview can also read our practical guide to Right to Work checks in 2026.
Right to Work does not end on the employee’s first day
One of the most significant weaknesses in Right to Work programmes is treating the process as part of onboarding rather than part of the employee lifecycle.
For employees with an indefinite right to work in the UK, a correctly conducted check before employment may provide a continuous statutory excuse.
However, many international employees have time-limited permission.
Where the statutory excuse is time-limited, employers need processes capable of identifying when a further check is required and ensuring that it is carried out at the appropriate time.
The Home Office guidance distinguishes between continuous and time-limited statutory excuses and sets out circumstances in which follow-up checks are necessary.
This is where an apparently simple compliance process can become an operational challenge.
An organisation employing 20 people may be able to manage expiry dates manually. An organisation employing hundreds or thousands of employees across different sites, business units and HR systems needs something more robust.
Who records when a further check will be required?
Who receives the reminder?
How far in advance is the employee contacted?
What happens if they have an outstanding immigration application?
Who knows when the Employer Checking Service should be used?
And who escalates the matter if the employee does not provide the required information?
The Home Office’s Employer Checking Service exists for situations in which an individual’s right to work cannot be established through the normal document or online checking process, including certain cases involving outstanding applications, appeals or difficulties accessing digital immigration status.
The compliance risk therefore rarely lies in one difficult case.
It lies in whether the organisation has a repeatable system for identifying and managing those cases every time they arise.
Immigration status and Right to Work are connected, but they are not the same process
Another common problem is the separation between the teams responsible for immigration and those responsible for Right to Work.
A Global Mobility or immigration team may know that an employee’s visa is being extended, switched or updated.
HR Operations may hold the Right to Work record.
Recruitment may have conducted the original check.
Unless those systems communicate, relevant information can easily sit in different parts of the organisation.
The reverse is equally important.
A valid visa does not remove the employer’s obligation to carry out the appropriate Right to Work check. Similarly, a sponsor’s immigration responsibilities do not replace the separate Right to Work regime.
For organisations that sponsor workers, the consequences of weak processes can therefore extend beyond an isolated Right to Work problem.
UK Sponsor Licence holders also have duties relating to the immigration status of the workers they sponsor, and failures in one part of the organisation may raise wider questions about the effectiveness of its immigration compliance systems.
This is why immigration compliance should not be spread across HR systems without clear ownership.
Recruitment, HR, Global Mobility and immigration advisers do not all need to perform the same role, but they do need to understand where one responsibility ends and another begins.
Decentralised hiring creates decentralised risk
The larger and more complex an organisation becomes, the harder consistency is to maintain.
A central HR team may have an excellent Right to Work policy, but what happens when recruitment is carried out by different business units, regional offices, newly acquired companies or managers who hire infrequently?
One location may retain evidence correctly. Another may not.
One recruiter may understand online checks. Another may accept a screenshot provided by the candidate.
One team may know when to escalate an unusual immigration status. Another may make assumptions based on documents it has seen previously.
Over time, organisations can end up with several versions of the same process operating simultaneously.
This is particularly relevant following mergers and acquisitions, restructures and transfers of employees.
Employers may inherit workforces whose historical Right to Work records were created under different systems and by different teams.
That creates an important due-diligence question:
When an organisation acquires a business or takes responsibility for a workforce, how much does it actually know about the quality of the immigration compliance records it is inheriting?
Right to Work should therefore form part of wider workforce due diligence rather than being considered solely at the point of recruitment.
Technology helps, but automation does not transfer responsibility
Technology is increasingly central to immigration and Right to Work compliance.
Used properly, it can help organisations:
- monitor expiry dates;
- create reminders;
- centralise documents; and
- produce clearer audit trails.
But technology can also create another form of false confidence.
An HR system may contain an expiry date, but is that the correct date?
A workflow may show that a check was completed, but was the right process followed?
An automated reminder may have been generated, but was anyone responsible for acting on it?
Technology is valuable because it can make good compliance processes more consistent.
It cannot compensate for a poorly designed process.
HR and Global Mobility leaders should therefore think carefully about the controls surrounding their technology: who enters the information, who verifies it, what exceptions are flagged and what happens when the system identifies a problem.
Automation should strengthen accountability, not replace it.
The Right to Work landscape is continuing to evolve
Employers also need to recognise that the framework itself does not stand still.
The updated Right to Work framework effective from 1 October 2026 extends the prescribed checking regime beyond conventional employees to certain people engaged under worker contracts and as individual subcontractors, alongside provisions affecting specified online matching services.
For organisations with increasingly flexible workforce models, this is significant.
Businesses are no longer made up solely of conventional permanent employees.
They may engage contractors, workers, consultants and other forms of flexible labour across multiple platforms and jurisdictions.
HR, Legal, Procurement and Global Mobility may therefore need to think more broadly about where responsibility for immigration compliance sits.
The question is increasingly not simply:
“Who are our employees?”
It is:
“Who is working for or through our organisation, and what compliance obligations arise from those arrangements?”
The Home Office’s employer guidance and revised Right to Work code both took effect in their current form from 1 October 2026.
What should HR and Global Mobility leaders be testing?
A useful compliance review should go beyond confirming that a Right to Work policy exists.
Select a sample of employee files and follow the process from beginning to end.
Ask:
- Can the organisation demonstrate when each check was conducted?
- Is the required evidence retained?
- Where an employee has time-limited permission, is the correct follow-up date recorded?
- Are upcoming checks visible to the appropriate team?
- Is there a defined process for employees with outstanding immigration applications?
- Are responsibilities clear between Recruitment, HR and Global Mobility?
Then test the system rather than just the files.
What happens when the person responsible for the process is absent?
How are new members of the HR team trained?
How are unusual cases escalated?
How are acquired employees incorporated into the organisation’s compliance process?
And how does management know whether the controls are actually working?
Home Office guidance requires employers to retain evidence of prescribed checks for the duration of employment and for two years afterwards, but good governance requires more than document retention.
It requires an organisation to understand why the evidence is being retained, what it demonstrates and who is responsible for acting when circumstances change.
The real test is not whether you have a policy
Most established employers will be able to produce a Right to Work policy.
Many will have an HR system containing immigration information.
Most HR teams will be familiar with share codes and online checks.
That is not necessarily where the real compliance risk lies.
The real risk is in the gaps between those processes:
- the follow-up check that was never diarised;
- the acquired employee whose records were never reviewed;
- the pending visa application that nobody escalated;
- the evidence that was stored incorrectly; or
- the business unit operating outside the central HR process.
Ultimately, the organisations that manage this well will be those that treat Right to Work as an ongoing governance responsibility rather than a document-collection exercise.
How Hudson McKenzie can assist
Hudson McKenzie supports employers, HR teams and Global Mobility professionals with Right to Work and wider UK immigration compliance matters.
Our support can include reviewing existing Right to Work processes, identifying compliance gaps, considering follow-up check procedures and helping organisations understand how Right to Work obligations interact with sponsor duties and wider workforce immigration arrangements.
Businesses can also explore our Immigration Compliance Services for Employers.
If you would like to discuss your organisation’s Right to Work processes or wider immigration compliance arrangements, contact Hudson McKenzie.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Right to Work and immigration requirements can change, and advice should be obtained based on individual circumstances.
Source: UK Home Office – Right to work checks: an employer’s guide
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