Most organizations have been aware of their responsibility to identify, track and report on business travelers for some time. However, due to the ambiguous ownership of business travelers (are they local HR, global mobility, tax?) and patchy rules and enforcement, many organizations have addressed the issue in an ad hoc manner.
For those who have avoided investigations and penalties, this approach may have worked until now, but how long will it continue to be possible?
Posted Worker Directive: Changing Attitudes Towards Business Traveler Compliance
By July 2020, the European Posted Worker Directive should be transposed into national legislation across Europe. While the exact definition will be based on each country’s national legislation, posted workers will include many business travelers.
As a result of this latest bout of Posted Worker Directive adoption, the risk for companies in doing nothing is going to grow quite considerably. Cross-border coordination between countries and the size of fines is increasing. Some countries are planning on publishing lists of those companies failing in their duties. This means that companies are going to need to start taking more of an organized approach to compliance for posted workers and this naturally pulls in business travelers.
There are some easy steps to make sure your company is ready:
- Assign responsibility for your business travelers and posted workers. This might be HR, tax, global mobility – it doesn’t matter too much who, but it does matter that there is someone overall responsible for ensuring compliance is adhered to
- Find a way to systematically identify your business travelers and posted workers. It is easy to plug your travel, security and expenses systems into software that sifts and identifies those who need tracking. If you can identify your business travelers, you will also uncover your posted workers
- Create workflow to deal with the results. Business traveler software can automatically ask employees to confirm their travel online, create tasks for HR/mobility, generate letters or reports and automatically send details to payroll. This type of workflow is straightforward to setup and means that you are ready to deal with the results of your identification process
Equus’ PinPoint business traveler software is already being used by companies to do all of the above today.
In the coming weeks, PinPoint will be further enhanced to make it easier to manage posted workers. New features will include:
- Making data collection from disparate sources easier: Request data from different people via single use secure links, allowing any HR/payroll/business manager to upload data directly
- Country task lists for posted workers: Containing the default required steps per host country, with the ability to further customize for specific business processes
- A1 form completion: Produce a completed A1 form directly from PinPoint (where forms are used)
The new enhanced PinPoint will allow you to identify, track and manage both your business travelers and your posted workers in one application.
Contact us to find out more.
