Are your right to work checks robust enough to withstand a Home Office visit?
The Challenge
Civil penalties for employing someone without the right to work have risen to £60,000 per illegal worker, and the Home Office makes unannounced visits. The obligation falls entirely on the employer: if your team cannot demonstrate a statutory excuse, your organisation is exposed regardless of intent. The volume and variety of documents your staff are expected to verify, passports, biometric residence permits, visa vignettes, share codes, eVisas, is increasing, and the consequences of getting it wrong have never been higher.
The Solution
BFI has been delivering right to work and document verification training for over 20 years. Our in-house programme gives every member of your team who touches the recruitment or onboarding process the knowledge to carry out checks correctly, spot fraudulent documents, and create a reliable statutory excuse, consistently, every time.
Course Overview
Why bring this training in-house?
- Compliance: Ensure every member of staff conducting checks meets the Home Office standard and knows when they need to escalate.
- Confidence: Equip your team to check unfamiliar document types eVisas, biometric permits, overseas passports without uncertainty or delay.
- Fraud prevention: Identify sophisticated counterfeit and AI-generated documents before they enter your onboarding process.
- Consistency: Replace self-taught or inconsistent practice with a single, reliable checking process across your whole organisation.
Learning objectives:
Right to work checking looks very different in a hospital trust recruiting internationally, a retailer with high-volume seasonal hiring, a professional services firm onboarding senior hires from overseas, or a logistics company managing agency workers. This programme is calibrated to the document types, hiring patterns and operational constraints most relevant to your organisation, including any TUPE transfers, agency worker arrangements, or overseas national cohorts that create particular complexity.
In-house delivery gives your organisation:
- Scenarios and document examples drawn from your actual hiring context and workforce profile
- Coverage of the specific visa routes and document types most relevant to your international hires
- A confidential space to surface and resolve the checking situations your team finds hardest, and those they may have been getting wrong
- A consistent, organisation-wide checking process that creates a defensible statutory excuse every time
Key training topics:
The programme covers all aspects of right to work compliance and document verification, structured across five modules. Depth is adjusted to your team’s starting knowledge and the complexity of your workforce.
Module 1 The Legal Framework, Right to Work Obligations, Civil Penalties, and the Statutory Excuse
Module 2 Immigration Status and the UK Visa System, Who Can Work for You and Under What Conditions
Module 3 Conducting Compliant Checks, Manual Verification, IDVT, the Home Office Online Service, and Share Codes
Module 4 Document Examination and Fraud Detection, Spotting Counterfeit, Altered and AI-Generated Documents
Module 5 Complex Situations and Live Practice, Agency Workers, Students, Time-Limited Permissions, and Tricky Cases
By the end of this training your team will be able to:
- Explain the right to work framework and the civil penalties that apply when checks are not conducted correctly
- Identify which documents are acceptable, which need follow-up, and which should not be accepted
- Carry out manual, online and IDVT checks correctly and record them in a way that creates a statutory excuse
- Check the most common document types, UK and overseas passports, biometric residence permits, eVisas, share codes, with confidence
- Recognise the indicators of counterfeit, altered and fraudulently obtained documents
- Handle complex situations, students, agency workers, time-limited permissions, and employees whose leave is expiring
Who will benefit from attendance:
This programme is for everyone in your organisation involved in recruiting, onboarding or managing employees, not just HR. Right to work checks are most commonly conducted by people with limited formal training, which is precisely where the risk concentrates.
This course is designed for:
- HR and recruitment professionals, who need a thorough, up-to-date grounding in right to work obligations and how to conduct checks that meet the current Home Office standard.
- Onboarding and administration teams, who carry out checks day to day and want to be confident they are doing them correctly, particularly when faced with unfamiliar documents.
- New starters in HR or resourcing roles, who are taking on right to work responsibilities for the first time and need a solid, practical foundation.
- Self-taught team members, who have been conducting checks without formal training and want to ensure their practice is compliant and up to date.
- Compliance, legal, vetting and background checking teams, who need to understand how right to work requirements interact with their wider screening and compliance processes.
- Global mobility and immigration teams, who manage sponsored workers and overseas nationals and need confidence in handling the full range of visa types and checking routes.
- Line managers and operational leaders, who make hiring decisions or oversee onboarding in settings where HR is not always present at the point of checking.
This course is particularly valuable for organisations that have grown quickly, that use agency workers or contractors alongside directly employed staff, or that are extending their international hiring and encountering a wider range of documents and visa types for the first time.
Contact Details
Catherine Ouston,
Head of In-House Training
📥 teamtraining@bfi.co.uk
📞 +44(0)1983 861133
