When your organisation is using third parties, it is essential to complete your own due diligence equal to the risk faced from the said relationship. With businesses and partnerships around the world growing, it is essential to make sure all your relationships and third parties are legal and legitimate. VinciWorks’ guide to risk based third party due diligence will give you a clearer understanding of how to conduct a detailed and genuine risk assessment.
VinciWorks has published an e-book warning businesses about the dangers of the gig economy.
Compliance Risks and the Gig Economy takes businesses through the potential legal minefield of using gig economy apps for business purposes. From renting a room through Airbnb, buying a service on UpWork or hailing a ride on Uber, when a business interacts with the gig economy, it can have a knock-on effect across compliance areas from employment law to equality to modern slavery. Most recently, already-under-fire Uber has recently been exposed for concealing a massive global breach of the personal information of 57 million customers and drivers in October 2016.
Prime Minister vows to crack down on those taking advantage of workers
Theresa May recently promised to overhaul the rights of millions of workers in the UK. The crackdown, regarded by one business group as “the biggest shake-up of employment law in generations”, includes the PM’s pledge to clamp down on firms using unpaid interns, quadruple fines for non-compliant organisations and launch a “naming and shaming” list of the worst perpetrators.
Millions of brits working independently
With around 14 million Brits taking part in some form of independent work, whether traditional freelance or through a new gig economy app, the potential compliance risks range from equality and discrimination to tax evasion, modern slavery, and even data protection.
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Click on a tax haven to learn more about their risks
What is a tax haven?
A tax haven is a jurisdiction or country that offers individuals and businesses favourable tax laws and regulations, often with low or no taxes on certain types of income or assets. These locations attract individuals and companies seeking to reduce their tax liabilities by taking advantage of the lenient tax policies and financial secrecy offered. Tax havens can facilitate tax avoidance or evasion strategies, as they provide opportunities to shield income and assets from higher tax jurisdictions. However, the use of tax havens is a controversial practice, as it can contribute to global tax imbalances and hinder efforts to combat tax evasion and ensure fair taxation.
What are the paradise papers?
The Paradise Papers refer to a leak of financial documents in 2017 that exposed the offshore activities and tax avoidance strategies of various individuals and companies. These documents, obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), revealed the offshore holdings and financial affairs of politicians, celebrities, corporations, and other entities. The Paradise Papers shed light on the complex webs of offshore accounts, shell companies, and trusts used to minimise tax obligations and maintain financial privacy.
What you need to know about the paradise papers leak
The recent huge leak of financial documents revealing how the ultra-rich are secretly investing large amounts of cash in tax havens is the biggest such leak since the Panama Papers last year.
How to get millennials to marry your company
Is your firm feeling a bit male, pale and stale? Have millennial hires turned your office into a revolving door, with new faces never staying long enough for you to remember their names? Is the talent pool shrinking, or is the traditional bait just no longer working?
Whatever the causes, failing to attract top talent is one of the top risks consistently identified by firms through VinciWorks Risk Management System. Like an apocalyptic horror novel where the human race ceases to reproduce, the risk of not attracting and retaining top talent is like a ticking clock counting down to demographic disaster. With every retirement party attended and every leaving card signed, another void opens up. It’s hard to know if it can ever be properly filled.
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The Importance of having an integrated risk and business strategy
Does your risk strategy and business strategy sit in two separate folders? When drafting your risk strategy, was it aligned to the business strategy and written with your organisational goals at the forefront? Or, as most companies do, is your risk strategy little more than a casually updated excel sheet?
Without an integrated risk and business strategy, the business will struggle to properly identify the long-term challenges that will affect your business, and thus will miss out on crucial indicators and controls and fail to see risk as a strategic priority.
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What business needs to prepare for in a hung parliament
As the clock struck ten on election night, it was all over. Theresa May’s gamble had failed to pay out. The majority was lost. An unexpected swing to Labour across key and unexpected constituencies took place, offset by a strong swing against the SNP. A surge in young voters turning out and a complete collapse of the UKIP vote meant that the 42% won by the Conservatives and the 40% won by Labour no longer resulted in a landslide, but a hung parliament.
Before the election, VinciWorks published an outline of what to expect after the election from a Conservative or Labour government. Neither of those results has come to pass, so here’s what business could expect, and should prepare for, in this new reality.
A hard Brexit won’t happen
There simply isn’t a majority in Parliament for the hard Brexit that Mrs May was proposing. Cutting off British access to the customs union and single market as the Conservative party wanted looks likely to be set adrift. The Tory’s partners in Parliament, the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, while themselves cheerleaders of Brexit, want a softer version and a frictionless border with the Republic of Ireland, and thus the EU.
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The dashboard of the Risk Management System is the nerve center of the risk management process. It provides an overview of an organisation’s risk profile, important alerts, top risks and the latest risk news.
This risk epicenter is now even more powerful with the addition of filters for categories and org units.
This granular view of your risks and controls enables you to drill down into any category or org unit and identify potential risks and opportunities. When using the filter, all elements of the dashboard, including reports, charts, control procedures etc. are updated with the filter.
The answer, Bell Pottinger has taught us, is yes. Mrs Thatcher’s favourite PR firm entered administration this week on the back of a disastrous, well, PR campaign. The swirling scandal that brought down an industry giant started with a £100,000 per month contract to run a campaign in South Africa on behalf of the Guptas, a family-run business empire ensnared in the largest web of corruption and political intrigue since the end of apartheid.
Does the Criminal Finances Bill put you at risk?
VinciWorks has created a five minute tax evasion assessment to help you evaluate your exposure to the new corporate criminal offence for failure to prevent tax evasion.
About Tax Evasion Risk Assessment
Described as “the largest expansion of UK corporate criminal liability since the Bribery Act”, the Criminal Finances Bill creates a new corporate criminal offence for failing to prevent tax evasion. HMRC has committed to naming and shaming tax evasion ‘enablers’, those who assist individuals in evading tax. New rules mean that organisations can be held liable for assisting in tax evasion even if they were not aware that it is taking place.
Data Protection: Privacy at Work
VinciWorks has just released the only data protection course your company needs. This course
combines the latest in policy and law with best practice guidelines for data protection. It provides real-world scenarios, interactive features and review questions to test participants’ understanding of key points. To begin, an interactive game will guide users through the complex web of decisions that every business must make when it comes to implementing data protection policies, providing a deeper understanding of the core issues.
Industry and Role-specific Customisable Course
This 20-minute course is our most customisable yet. At the start of the course, each user specifies their individual role, responsibilities, location, and more to create a user-specific learning plan. With over 1,000 different course options available, anyone in your organisation can take this data protection course.
After taking the course users will:
- Understand how data protection affects real-world scenarios, with review questions to test participants’ understanding of key points
- Know the latest in policy and law with best practice guidelines for data protection
- Know how to comply with data protection laws for the user’s specific role in your organisation
- Learn how changes to regulation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) affect their work