£750 Tax On New Employees?
Over the past couple of weeks HO representatives have suggested that biometrics will be used to confirm the identity of people starting jobs. This would require either an HR manager and the new recruit visiting a passport office to validate identity; or businesses owning or leasing their own readers.
Either way, there will be a surcharge attached to the process. Previous statements from the HO have suggested they would charge businesses £750 for an NIR search. Bit steep.
They have also suggested that NID cards could be used for access to work buildings. Presumably this would rely on the rather poor Chip & PIN functionality of the card, making it probably a more expensive and no more secure system than the existing proximity cards employed by many companies.
Does the Home Office really believe that businesses are going to see any need to buy into the above schemes? Presumably both are just symptomatic of the way in which the HO is beginning to question its own fag-packet figures and realising that the cash will still have to come from somewhere. Surely if the scheme were to go ahead your NIR number would be linked to your National Insurance number, already required to work in this country, and as such any kind of biometric scan would be needless - effectively another of those "trivial searches" they're suddenly beginning to worry about.
They've been quick to point out that private sector companies won't have anything beyond confirmation access to the NIR, which means they expect businesses to query the NIR every time an employee goes through particular doors in the business's premises (or that they lied). Surely, biometric searches or no, this would mean a colossal workload for the NIR network. Note that even at this late stage, there doesn't seem to be any kind of joined-up thinking coming from the HO in relation to the NID scheme. We have one set of "experts" desperately looking for ways of funding the NIR, and another set of "experts" trying to turn the scheme from the unworkable mess it is in currently to something technologically feasible. Pity that both efforts seem to be pulling in completely the opposite direction.
both suggestions cited in the Guardian.
Either way, there will be a surcharge attached to the process. Previous statements from the HO have suggested they would charge businesses £750 for an NIR search. Bit steep.
They have also suggested that NID cards could be used for access to work buildings. Presumably this would rely on the rather poor Chip & PIN functionality of the card, making it probably a more expensive and no more secure system than the existing proximity cards employed by many companies.
Does the Home Office really believe that businesses are going to see any need to buy into the above schemes? Presumably both are just symptomatic of the way in which the HO is beginning to question its own fag-packet figures and realising that the cash will still have to come from somewhere. Surely if the scheme were to go ahead your NIR number would be linked to your National Insurance number, already required to work in this country, and as such any kind of biometric scan would be needless - effectively another of those "trivial searches" they're suddenly beginning to worry about.
They've been quick to point out that private sector companies won't have anything beyond confirmation access to the NIR, which means they expect businesses to query the NIR every time an employee goes through particular doors in the business's premises (or that they lied). Surely, biometric searches or no, this would mean a colossal workload for the NIR network. Note that even at this late stage, there doesn't seem to be any kind of joined-up thinking coming from the HO in relation to the NID scheme. We have one set of "experts" desperately looking for ways of funding the NIR, and another set of "experts" trying to turn the scheme from the unworkable mess it is in currently to something technologically feasible. Pity that both efforts seem to be pulling in completely the opposite direction.
both suggestions cited in the Guardian.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 4:03 pm
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