Article
6 min read
Author
Jemima Owen-Jones
Published
December 04, 2023
Last Update
July 03, 2024
Table of Contents
What is continuous compliance?
Why traditional compliance isn’t working
Unlock continuous compliance with Deel’s Compliance Hub
Becoming more global is critical to unlocking growth. While many businesses expect to grow domestically, huge opportunities can be found in overseas markets, allowing companies to access wider talent pools, reach new markets, and mitigate risk at home.
According to HSBC’s 2022 Going global for growth report of 2,100 businesses in the UK, of those already operating overseas, around half (53%) say their overseas ventures are critical to their growth prospects. Moreover, the more markets in which these businesses operate, the more growth they have achieved.
The survey also found that:
Businesses are ready to grow and increasingly recognize that international markets represent their best chance of transforming their business potential. However, while global expansion brings many benefits, it poses numerous challenges and concerns.
Almost a third (30%) of businesses agree that launching into international markets can be difficult. 34% say that the biggest challenge lies in increased costs, while 33% warn of needing to deal with more regulation and compliance.
One day, HR and compliance teams are managing employee benefits and taxes at the local level, and the next, they’re navigating international employment laws and foreign tax regulations. Staying on top of these changes is vital for business success, but it can become overwhelming, especially when managing different types of workers across multiple countries.
—Samuel Dahan,
Chair of Deel Lab
Moreover, regulations and laws are constantly evolving. Governments can introduce new labor legislation, revise tax regulations, or update employment and industry standards with little notice. Failing to implement or reflect these changes in your compliance program can result in substantial fines, reputational damage, and operational setbacks.
This article explores what continuous compliance involves, how it impacts companies’ ability to plan and execute expansion strategies and workforce growth, and how the latest technology supports continuous compliance to help businesses thrive in this increasingly global environment.
Continuous compliance is the ongoing practice of maintaining compliance with legal and regulatory requirements that is proactive, ongoing, and risk-based. It involves monitoring and evaluating compliance risks, identifying and addressing compliance gaps, and implementing preventive measures to ensure ongoing compliance.
On a global scale, continuous compliance involves consistently monitoring and evaluating a company’s adherence to legal and regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions worldwide. This is no easy feat, particularly with many laws and compliance requirements spanning everything from employment law to data privacy and tax reporting.
We can broadly categorize legal and regulatory compliance into the following areas:
Industry advice on staying up-to-date on regulatory changes is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building an internal legal counsel, recruiting local legal firms, or spending hundreds of human hours managing compliance yourself, which involves:
While the first approach is out of reach for many smaller-budget businesses, the do-it-yourself approach isn’t sustainable either, especially with so many legal and regulatory changes taking place across the globe every day.
Thomson Reuters 2023 Cost of Compliance survey, which generated responses from more than 350 practitioners across the US, the EU, and the UK, identified 61,228 regulatory events across 190 countries in 2022. This figure translates to an average of 234 daily alerts. The figures signify the sheer volume of regulations companies need to cope with and the rapid pace at which they change.
The survey also found that:
The complexity, direct costs, and risks associated with ever-changing legal and regulatory changes create uncertainty and instability, making it difficult for businesses to plan for the future and make long-term investments. This can stifle a company’s expansion and workforce growth.
—Samuel Dahan,
Chair of Deel Lab
Until now, no HR or compliance platform has provided a solution to continuous compliance.
Deel’s Compliance Hub is the first-of-its-kind solution for continuous compliance. The one-stop-shop takes compliance to a whole new level by actively monitoring, flagging, and providing regulatory updates and compliance insights, helping you adopt a proactive approach to navigating the ever-changing regulatory landscape.
The Compliance Hub has three powerful features to help streamline continuous global compliance, mitigating more risk than any other provider. These include:
Workforce Insights: By analyzing your worker data and the latest compliance developments, the compliance monitor generates monthly workforce insights reports that proactively alert you to misclassification risks and vulnerabilities, such as expiring visas and noncompliance with employment laws such as minimum wage, benefits, and more—all tailored to the unique concerns of your business. The Workforce Insights is accessible on-platform and delivered to your email monthly.
The Compliance Monitor: Instead of conducting time-consuming compliance audits and risk assessments to identify and address potential compliance gaps, the compliance monitor uses automation to help you navigate the ever-changing compliance landscape. The tool automates your compliance processes, proactively scanning, collecting, and explaining the latest regulatory changes globally, covering areas such as wages, pensions, private insurance, leave changes, tax obligations, and more across 150 countries. The monitor uses simplified language to provide concise summaries of the impact on your business so you can take action quickly.
The AI-based Worker Classifier: Unlike other more basic tools, our AI-based worker classifier uses award-winning research into localized employment count cases to classify your workers with over 90% accuracy, putting you in control of misclassification risk management. This makes navigating the onboarding process for new hires straightforward and compliant. Answer a few questions, and you’ll receive an indication of the worker’s classification using relevant local laws and precedent legal cases.
Deel is the only platform on the market that uses continuous monitoring to provide real-time compliance alerts for 150 countries, enabling you to stay aware of your compliance status while you confidently hire and manage workers across the globe.
💡 Deel’s compliance framework is SOC2 compliant and undergoes annual third-party audits to mitigate security gaps, and meet global compliance standards. In addition, we’ve built our entire information security program on the globally recognized framework, ISO 27001.
Ready to put continuous global compliance on autopilot? Book a call with a compliance expert to see how Deel can take more risk off your plate than any other provider.
Solutions
© Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.