In the Spotlight: Compliance Management for Today’s Business Travel and Remote Work

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to affect employee mobility as governments around the world make changes to immigration, payroll, tax, and social security laws. Assessing new areas of risk, compliance requirements, and employee duty of care is critical for organizations with distributed workforces. BGRS’s Tanya Caruana, Director, TripWise Solution Team, is In the Spotlight to discuss risk and compliance management solutions.

Can you comment on the recent changes in business travel and remote work?

Tanya Caruana: We have all been faced with severe disruptions last year. An unprecedented global health crisis, severe people mobility and travel restrictions, and where possible, transition to a mostly all remote work force. All of this has heightened the focus on employee experience and wellbeing, and employer flexibility and duty of care. At the same time governments are enacting a complex web of changes to immigration, tax, and social security regulations, which has compounded an already complicated mobile workforce and business travel compliance.

As we are collectively settling into the new, unpredictable normal and look ahead to the resuming of travel and people mobility, many organizations are seeking to reassess their exposure and approach to risk monitoring. They are looking to review or redesign their policies and guidelines and implement solutions that will streamline risk and compliance management, leveraging an agile and scalable approach.

How can organizations benefit from utilizing BGRS’s business travel solution – TripWise™?

Tanya: Clients are coming to us with questions such as:

• How do we most effectively analyze travel and remote work-related risk exposure given the changing landscape?
• How should we adjust or design our business travel policy?
• How do we implement a solution efficiently while minimizing costs and increasing compliance?

TripWise™ is our innovative, digitally-enabled solution for a multitude of risk and compliance management scenarios from a detailed post travel data analysis to create an internal business case to comprehensive employee pre-trip assessments that include alerts on immigration, tax, social security, to permanent establishment and EU Posted Worker Directive compliance, to continuous monitoring of actual travel and days in country.

We provide a truly end-to-end solution to our client organizations by offering technology as well as consulting services to assess their risk exposure and program design. Our teams manage the subsequent program implementation and technology configuration, including third-party integration support. We draw on our flexible service offering to provide operational program management based on specific clients’ needs, which may include active compliance monitoring, ongoing program configuration support, and direct client and mobile employee support. We offer program reporting and analytics, which include ongoing consultancy, expert insights to drive decisions and program iterations, and a formal annual program health check. And of course, we leverage BGRS’s global supplier network to provide services such as temporary accommodation, immigration, and tax. We use our existing client accounting resources to audit and pay third-party vendor invoices. Our focus is on offering a solution that meets the needs of the stakeholders in all functions responsible for, or impacted by, business travel and remote work compliance and one that supports the client in meeting their duty of care objectives. We strive to be the flexible partner they can lean on as much as they need.

What are some of the benefits for the mobile employee?

We focus on an exceptional customer experience and duty of care, acknowledging the stress employees can be under in these uncertain times. For example, when a crisis or disaster strikes the ability to easily locate and contact employees and for them to be able to contact their employer is critical. TripWise™ offers convenience for the employee to record their travel or remote work plans, get instant travel alerts, see up-to-date COVID-19 requirements and restrictions, use the panic alert functionality, both store and easily access related documentation, and more. In addition, we provide expert and empathetic customer support to make them feel reassured and supported.

In summary, the ability to holistically scale up travel and remote work monitoring, get access to reliable risk data and expert advice to take mitigating actions, is where an end-to-end configurable solution can play a big role.