Once your organisation has established a contract to provide a service to another entity in another Member State, you are going to have to look into whether notifying the authorities, concerned with posting of workers, is mandatory or not, as some business sectors and specific services do not require you to do so. The same applied if you just want to temporarily move out workers across borders between branches of your own organisation. Regardless if you are required to or not, however, you need to be aware of the importance of notifying Member States. For that reason, we’ll briefly discuss why do you need to bother with notifications, and shortly overlook what this step of the posting of worker process includes.
Compliance with directives
Remember when we briefly mentioned what the Posting of Workers Directive (PWD) and Enforcement Directive (ED) were concerned with? Terms and conditions aside, posting notifications, or declarations, as they are called in some countries, are another part of complying with said directives and national legislation of Member States. Since national authorities want to be aware of the labour mobility between the members of the EU, to protect the economies from social dumping and other ill-natured practices, companies are therefore required by law to provide the necessary posting details and information through online platforms, where each case is processed and recorded. Although it is fairly straightforward to perform the notifications, having to process the information for multiple people is not just time consuming, but also risk-inducing if any mistakes are present in the declared information. Since the information you fill in in the field of the posting authority’s website will be used by the monitoring and control experts, any human error can lead to a fine for the organisation.
Information validity, an example of an error
Talking about compliance and fines is okay, but let’s look at an example – you’re a Swedish company, which specialised in the local and Scandinavian market in the manufacturing and installation of solar panel systems on roofs for industrial, commercial, and residential buildings. You have signed your first contract to conduct the installation service in Germany, so you have to post your workers to install the solar panel modules and setup the system. It is a large project, so you need to send about 15 people for a duration of 30 about calendar days. How do we go about with notifying the German authorities?
You’ll need two “sets” of information – about the companies, and the workers. The companies’ information is mainly the name, registration and VAT numbers, and he addresses of both companies, while the employee’s information is often the name, personal number, job position and classification code, and registered address. None of this is complicated to prepare, so where’s the risk? Well, some Member States have additional information needed to be specified. Since we’re “posting” to Germany, this information is specifying one or several people, who will be designated with an additional role of being the contact person, or for document keeping, or authorised recipient, each of which having additional responsibilities. After you delegate the roles, you need to go to the respective website for Germany, register your company account, since you’ve never posted to Germany before. All that’s left for you now is to fill in the information after an hour or so of typing and reading, so you don’t make a mistake, and complete the notification – the job’s done. That’s all there is to it.
Now, suppose an inspection of this posting is made by the authorities, and it turns out that some of the employee data you filled in is incorrect. If you’re doing a mundane task for hours, it can happen, it’s human, however, authorities have strict regulations. So, what would happen in our Sweden-to-Germany posting case? Well, in case of failure in obligation to notify and retain documents, although the fine can’t exceed € 30.000 per employee, that is still not a small amount. Depending on past records of errors, this can lead to further development, if an inspection further discovers any non-compliance with the established minimum working conditions, minimum wage and/or non-cooperation with the inspection authorities, your organisation can be charged with a fine of up to € 500.000. Note, that there are, of course, other financial consequences for neglecting compliance as well and, needless to say, no company can just laugh this off, nor do we believe would want to be subjected to such an experience with the authorities.
Resolving the human errors in notifications
Knowing what can follow, if you’re not careful with your posting notifications, the obvious solution for human errors, is to decrease the human involvement in filling in the information manually. WorkisrOund’s automated notification service does precisely that. What would take you about an hour of typing out the information for the group of people and company details can take you but a few minutes, having everything automatically written down in the notification forms, leaving you only with validating it yourself, if interested, or simply finishing the notification process with the final submit button. It doesn’t matter if you’re sending only two or twenty people, the automated administrative solution can help you save time and effort, leaving you spend the time on your other important tasks at hand. If you wish to get a preview of how it works, just contact us.