VEHICLES AND DRIVERS - ACQUISITORIAL CRIME
THE PROBLEM
The Company has several thousand monthly paid employees and a high turnover of weekly paid, and migrant workers who are recruited when projects need contract labour.
Almost anyone could drive a vehicle and, save for specialised machinery which required highly skilled operatives with safety certificates, almost anyone did. Identifying whether a driver had the entitlement to drive that class of vehicle, or was a British driving licence holder, or not disqualified by excessive penalty points or illness was more an assumption than a fact.
In the event of road traffic offences, speeding and congestion charging issues, backtracking on who was the actual driver at the time, was not a scientific process. If the driver could not be named, the named Director of the Company could have been legally liable for the offence.
Outsourced service suppliers could only operate on the basis of data provided, but this left a gap where documents produced were not probingly examined and/or subjected to counterfeiting detection techniques. If one document was forged, then every other document produced by the applicant was also suspect. Any drivers’ vetting system had to start on the basis of proving the documents to be correct and the applicant is who he purports to be so that the data footprints at the DVLA will also be correct.
THE DRC SOLUTION
A Drivers vetting system was introduced to establish cohesion between HR recruitment and fleet management.
Key to success was the deployment of technology capable of detecting forged drivers licences, passports and other identity documents. Only then could in-house data footprints be relied upon to provide integrity and compliance to legal systems.
Each existing staff member and every new recruit was invited to complete a data protection act mandate, allowing the company to confirm data held about them with the drivers section of the DVLA.
Systems were brought in to manage entitlement-to-drive issues, particularly around mini buses, and to ensure that staff who had residency in the UK had exchanged their overseas licences for a British one. The processes could be turned around within 48 hours and did not impede recruitment. New staff could not drive in the first week.
The company has seen many benefits across the business, as provenance of documents gives added value to timekeeping and payments systems, as well as road traffic issues. The Company is further protected from unwittingly breaching immigration issues, and risks are now manageable and acceptable. Cost benefits will be taken further with Insurance issues being re-negotiated.