6 reasons why the who’s who of the Australian Hospitality Industry use vSure for Work Rights Compliance
Australia’s best hospitality groups use vSure to automate visa monitoring, streamline on-boarding and protect their reputations
In an industry that relies on workers on temporary visas, compliance with the obligation to check and keep checking employee work rights throughout the employment cycle can be a difficult and time-consuming, manual process.
The risks & fines of non-compliance
Apart from reputational risk and the threat of being banned from sponsoring visa holders, Hospitality businesses risk on the spot civil penalties (with no recourse and no ignorance defense) of up to $396,000 per worker found working in breach of their rights.
Directors and Officers can be personally liable for civil penalties of up to $79,200 per foreign worker found working in breach of their rights
Recent news reports claim that there are over 77,000 people in Australia who have overstayed their visa or are here illegally. Expect more media attention, political rhetorique and importantly, compliance crackdowns as this populist “anti-immigration” movement grows.
Read this article if you want to know more about employer compliance obligations.
How vSure helps
Over 14 years of delivering Australia’s leading work rights compliance platform, vSure is now used by the majority of multi-venue hospitality groups in Australia, covering more than 3,000 individual venues.
Here’s 6 reasons why the majority of the Australian Hospitality Industry use vSure for Work Rights Compliance:
1. Seamless integration with all the leading systems
vSure integrates with the hospitality industry’s leading Workforce Management and HR systems. Whether your venue(s) use:
vSure has seamless 2-way integration to make management of work rights easy. And vSure has formal partnership with many of the key workforce management and HR software vendors, ensuring optimal integration and support.
2. Simplified Student Visa holiday management
Primary student visa holders under the 8015 condition are limited to 48 hours during semester and can work more hours during their holidays. The hospitality industry relies on these additonal hours as a core means of fulfilling shifts.
BUT employers must have auditable “Evidence of Course Dates” in order to take advantage of the additional hours during holiday periods.
vSure makes this easy and even flows the rostering restrictions seamlessly through to ensure compliance.
3. Ultimate best-of-breed solution
vSure does nothing but work rights compliance and visa checks. Meaning we spend every day, every hour solving for the challenges work rights compliance imposes on the hospitality industry. And over more than 14 years living and breathing this specific challenge for employers, we have become very, very good at it!
Whether it be:
- Identifying student visa work rights beyond a visa check, including course start dates (student visa holders cannot start work before their course has started) and course level (certain courses make the visa holder exampt from the “48 hour rule”); or
- Managing the 180 day rule for visa holders between sponsors; or
- Managing visas with designated regional work restrictions; or
- Delivering the “visa held report” which is needed annually by sponsoring employers for the various state authorities; or
- Managing the exemption (or otherwise) of the hospitality industry from the Working Holiday “6 month per location” rule;
- Collecting visa grant letters from people moving onto bridging visas (which don’t appear until after the previous substantive visa has expired); etc etc
4. Automation rules
vSure automatically monitors all temporary visas, proactively alerting employers to:
- New visas and conditions;
- Upcoming expiries;
- Decisions on bridging visas;
- Visa cancelations; etc
Alerts are available within a user friendly dashboard and reports as well as push notifications via email or SMS to key staff as required.
5. Optimal Employee Experience
vSure has worked with Australia’s largest employers to build an optimal workflow for Right To Work checks. This includes:
- Automated email and SMS triggered from your workflow within your onboarding system;
- Multi-lingual (including Nepalese, upon which Australian kitchens so heavily rely) to help the employee understand what documents are required;
- Optimised imagery for fast and easy understanding of what is being requested;
- Simple touch interface with integration to mobile phone camera;
- Just snap a photo of the passport and the AI reads the image, no data entry required; etc etc
Check out this video to see the employee experience:
6. Class leading cyber security
Right to work documents are sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII). vSure invests heavily in ensuring optimal cyber security. Being ISO 27001 certified provides hospitality employers and employees alike with the reassurance that their data is safe.
Want to know more?
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Case Study:
Solotel – Australia’s most diverse hospitality group
“With more than 20 venues and hundreds of staff across Sydney & Brisbane, like most metro hospitality companies, we are heavily reliant on foreign workers (particularly working holiday makers, student visa and bridging visa holders).This creates a compliance burden to meet the obligation to check and keep checking our employee’s work rights. One that would be too easy to deprioritise or overlook.”
“vSure has provided us with a simple, fast solution to check and monitor our staff’s work rights. With tight integration with our TANDA Workforce Management and HR platform, we have been able to completely streamline and practically automate the collection of identity documents and completion of Right To Work checks”
“The audit trail that vSure provides us over our work rights compliance, is an insurance policy that has a value, not just in terms of the company and directors avoiding potential fines, but importantly protecting our brand and reputation.”
Sarah Maxwell – People & Performance Director
Why Should My Business Check Work Rights for Employees?
Employers should check the work rights for ALL staff, including sighting proof of citizenship OR verifying the visa status for all non-citizen workers both before and during employment. Offences and fines were first introduced in the 2013 Employer Sanctions legislation and strengthened in 2024 with the Strengthening Employer Compliance Act.
If staff are detected working in breach of visa conditions or without a valid visa, the employer can face penalties. Penalties include fines and in some cases criminal sanctions. Fines apply on a strict liability basis – this means that the business may be penalised even if they are not aware that staff are working unlawfully.
On top of this, company directors and officers may face personal liability if there are illegal workers in the business.
There have been a number of businesses in the hospitality industry who have been targeted by the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Department of Home Affairs. Due to data matching initiatives between the ATO and other government agencies, employers hiring staff unlawfully are more likely than ever to be caught.