Do Not Make This Compliance Mistake

Morally, what is the difference between consciously breaking the law and unknowingly breaking the law in a confusing system? 

Legally, there is no difference. Walmart, for the crime of unknowingly employing 250 illegal aliens through a staffing partner, had 60 of their locations across 21 states raided and was fined $11 million. 

Most large-scale retailers engage in contracts with staffing partners and take bids for jobs like janitors. In fact, K-Mart and Target have both been shown to indirectly employ illegal immigrants as well. Since the growth of the contingent workforce industry in the 1990s, this sort of practice has become rampant in all sorts of stores and corporate headquarters that employ maintenance staff at their physical locations. 

In another story, a hiring manager was at the point of recruiting a contingent employee full-time and asked his HR department to run a routine background check. He was speechless when he discovered that the company’s newest and brightest candidate had a recent felony theft conviction. The staffing partner in this story had failed to run a background check, or if they did, it was inadequate. The client lost time and money because it had to restart a three-month tryout process. 

Are you treating independent contractors like employees? (looking at you IR35)  

Are your contingent workers past their legal tenure? 

In the world of extended labor, these are common. The #1 way to avoid compliance issues like this, and reduce risk, is to implement an extended workforce management system (formerly referred to as a VMS (Vendor Management System).

How We Do Compliance

Compliance capture is a central tenant of 3SS (3 Story Software). When configuring your compliance process into our system, you can force suppliers to upload certain documents and confirm delivery or receipt of various equipment, like badges and computers. You will not believe how many contingent employees retain their badges after the assignment is complete! 

There are several levels to how 3SS handles compliance. There are on and offboarding requirements: like drug screen requirements and work authorization documents. Externally, you can notify your staffing partners or suppliers as to what these compliance requirements are via the system so they must complete and confirm them, just as they would confirm that certain skills are met for the assignment. 

You can leverage our compliance module internally by configuring the system to send an alert to your IT group notifying them of a new hire who will require new login credentials, or that those credentials should be voided at the end of the assignment. These are the basic requirements you can apply on a template level to all assignments.  

One level further, 3SS also allows you to configure requirements for certain types of assignments. For example, you could configure requirements based on location or job title. 

At the juncture where you submit a requisition or assignment for bids, you can also implement additional compliance checks on top of your standard requirements and implement stops in the requisition process when these requirements are not met, like preventing a candidate from being assigned to a requisition if they do not meet a specific compliance requirement. 

At 3SS, we recommend setting requirements at the site level (every customer, whether an MSP (Managed Service Provider) or staffing partner, has their own instance of 3SS that they can configure to fit their process). Each compliance requirement can have validation option (like expiration dates on certifications) that gets uploaded into the system for tracking purposes. 

These compliance requirements can even be configured to change the assignment status and send email alerts to you AND suppliers if a requirement is not met or has expired, allowing our clients full oversight of their workforce. 

Additionally, we recommend that all our clients have a defined compliance process in which a member of your team regularly downloads the available compliance reports for internal review. 

Take a peek at how 3SS can help your company meet its compliance needs and book a discovery call today.