I swear people just want to be unhappy.
We say we don’t want companies to illegally hire, yet when they do and face the consequences of it, we get sob stories like this that basically state “actually businesses should be able to break the law if it’s more profitable to do.”
We can’t have low fines, otherwise companies just treat it as a cost of doing business… I’m sure we’ve all seen stories of big companies knowingly breaking the law and being fined pennies, and things like small companies fly tipping because occasionally being caught works out cheaper than proper waste management.
The onus is on the hiring company to check if the person has all the required paperwork and has a legal right to work.
Which is not exactly hard. The people who hire illegal workers do so to save money, not because it’s somehow hard to check a piece of paper.
Voters: You must crack down on immigration.
Also voters: Not like that!
It’s not usually the voters complaining about the fines, it’s the business owners that pay for opposition to them.
When the man was hired in early 2023, he provided the chippie with a national insurance number, proof of student loan payments and housing benefit receipts from the local council. He also provided a photocopy of his British passport and was paid via pay as you earn (PAYE) through HMRC.
Shouldn’t they fine the illegal in that case? It sounds like the business took appropriate measures.
Granted, you can check if a passport is authentic using your phone (as passports have RFID chips which contain digitally signed data that your phone can read) but I wouldn’t expect an old bloke to know how to do that
That’s why businesses insist on seeing your actual passport. Not a picture of it.
I can give you a picture of anything, that’s been true for years even before the rise of image generation AI. I once had to mail my passport via recorded courier to a company in London in order to apply for a job in Leeds. Hell of a pain but necessary.
I had a job and they only wanted a picture scan of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mailing it sounds super annoying. Thankfully I have multiple.
I think HMRC should probably make an official app for scanning passports and verifying right to work. It is definitely possible. Also would help with a visa (since you could probably fake a visa easier than faking a passport. Although I think biometric residence permits are scannable. But the physical cards were phased out unfortunately.)
Yeah this was for a pretty secure job where you had to be a citizen in order to be eligible, so they would been a bit oversensitive with the passport, but really every business should see the physical passport because I could send them anything.
It’s easy enough to fake a picture of a passport but much harder to fake the actual passport. If someone’s coming into the business on their first day just have them bring the passport with them on that day. The only reason I had to mail my passport was because I was going to work in a remote office.
There is the point where if the person had valid identification, and National Insurance, and was paid via HMRC, that the onus should be on notifying the business of a change of status. Whether that’s the student or HMRC I don’t know. They would notify the business on a change of required tax.
Yeah, I feel HMRC should have done something other than wait two years before going “actually no, pay us a fine”.
