By Legal Futures Associate Amiqus
Since the UK Home office has introduced changes to the right to work checks on the 1st of October 2022, all UK employers, including law firms, must use a government certified identity service provider (IDSP) to digitally verify employee right to work statuses, or go back to physically checking their new hires’ documents in person.
All law firms have a legal obligation to check the status of prospective employees, in order to ensure they have the right to work in the UK. Failing to meet the requirements that prove the right to work i.e. not completing the proper checks and retaining the records, could result in firms being fined up to £20,000 per breach.
In addition to the Right to Work changes that affect all members of staff, law firms must ensure compliance with the staff vetting requirements laid down in the HM Treasury approved LSAG guidance. It requires firms to have a policy in place and carry out screening on their frontline AML staff, as well as beneficial owners, officers and managers of the firm (BOOMs) – both at the pre-employment stage and on an ongoing basis.
How can Amiqus help you?
Legal firms can still meet their new staff face-to-face to verify their right to work documentation, however it is a lot more challenging to verify if their document is legitimate by looking at it in person, as well as extremely insecure.
Amiqus is not only a government certified identity service provider (IDSP) for digital right to work and DBS criminal record checks, but also an end-to-end onboarding and compliance platform, which helps keep all processes in one place. This helps avoid duplication, extra costs by employing multiple providers, and extra effort.
With Amiqus, firms can easily and securely conduct all staff checks, as well as their AML checks through one single platform. Using Amiqus will save you time and resources, reduce the risk of errors, and ensure that firms have access to the information they need in order to make informed hiring decisions.
Amiqus is trusted by hundreds of organisations across sectors including the NHS Business Service Authority (NHS BSA) who saved £1.3 million worth of time by streamlining their right to work and other pre-employment screening processes by using Amiqus.
How Amiqus helped NHS BSA to conduct pre-employment checks quickly and efficiently:
NHS Business Services Authority is a central shared HR service for the NHS. They manage over £35 billion of NHS spend annually, delivering a range of national services to NHS organisations, NHS contractors, patients and the public.
A Bring Back Staff (BBS) scheme was introduced in March 2020, to attract ex-staff back into clinical practice to support the COVID-19 response and the vaccine rollout. Prior to using Amiqus, their employee screening processes were slower than necessary, typically manually managed on an outsourced basis , paper-based, challenging to be completed remotely and prone to inaccuracy.
Amiqus worked closely with the NHS BSA team and adapted its proven technologies to help reduce the backlog of volunteers to the COVID-19 emergency. It did so by speeding up pre-employment screening, reducing it from a few weeks, to as little as a few days. As a result, qualified and fully vetted people were able to provide frontline care faster.
Before using Amiqus, NHS BSA experienced a 3 week delay at the recruitment manager level just to verify identity documents and right to work. With Amiqus, they were able to digitally conduct over 16,000 pre-employment checks across various services and quickly deploy volunteer returners to front line roles.
If you’re looking for a trusted partner to support your business, manage your staff vetting and conduct pre-employment screening, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.
