ESG regulations are government standards for ESG actions or disclosures. While the ESG space is mainly unregulated, legal requirements are coming in different countries and at different paces. Some are already in force and certain businesses may already find themselves having to undertake ESG disclosures depending on their size and industry.
Continue readingOmnitrack has released a powerful new feature: customisable buttons. This new feature takes flexibility for your workflows to the next level. Custom buttons allow you to add your own action buttons, with your own wording and colours, at each stage. Instead of just the generic ‘Submit’ or ‘Save’ buttons, you can now add buttons to look, say and do whatever you want them to.
This new feature gives the admin a lot more choices in terms of what they can do as a next step for the submission. With this no-code software, you can build the workflow exactly the way you want.
When you use this feature, you can customise any workflow with action buttons.
Once a custom button has been created, instead of the regular “submit” button users see at the bottom of most forms, they’ll see the customisable button instead.
As the administrator, you can decide how the button will look, what it will say on it, and what will happen when a user clicks the button.
On 11 January 2022, the UK government published a consultation seeking views for how a worldwide 15% minimum corporation tax should be domestically implemented. The consultation will run for 12 weeks, until 4 April 2022.
Background:
In May 2019, the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS (Inclusive Framework) agreed a Programme of Work for Addressing the Tax Challenges of the Digitalisation of the Economy.
The Programme of Work is divided into two pillars:
Pillar One addresses the allocation of taxing rights between jurisdictions and considers various proposals for new profit allocation and nexus rules;
Pillar Two (also referred to as the “GloBE” proposal) focuses on the remaining BEPS issues and seeks to develop rules that would provide jurisdictions with a right to “tax back” where other jurisdictions have not exercised their primary taxing rights or the payment is otherwise subject to low levels of effective taxation.
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Carbon literacy means making people aware of the cost of climate change in everyday activities, and how emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere can be reduced with individual, organisational and structural changes.
Carbon literacy is more than just hot air. It focuses teams to understand climate change from a scientific level. Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human life, with climate change already causing severe weather disruption around the world and putting millions of people at risk from extreme weather events. Carbon literacy helps a business to understand what that means, and what can be done.
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Despite the ongoing pandemic, compliance departments can still enter the new year with a sense, if not an outline, of what should be on their agenda in 2022. Preparing for rapid, sudden changes in 2022, from new Covid-19 variants to supply chain problems or catastrophic climate events, should still be high on every compliance officer’s agenda. But that doesn’t mean planning for the expected should take a back seat.
In this webinar, our Director of Best Practice Gary Yantin and Director of Learning and Content Nick Henderson looked at the regulatory and compliance horizon for the upcoming year.
They discussed the top items you can expect to see in your regulatory inbox. Change might be a constant in this day and age, but it doesn’t have to be unexpected, unplanned, or catch you unprepared.
The webinar covered:
Nick Henderson is Director of Learning and Content at VinciWorks and has played an important role in developing VinciWorks’ most interactive and customisable courses covering topics such as anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, GDPR, diversity, mental health, health and safety and more. Nick is a policy expert with a background in public, voluntary and private sectors and has expert-level knowledge across a wide range of areas.
As Director of Best Practice at VinciWorks, Gary Yantin works with professional service firms of all sizes to provide the best compliance learning experience for their staff. He was previously an in-house lawyer and a solicitor in private practice. Gary has hosted many webinars and workshops for VinciWorks on a wide range of risk and compliance topics including GDPR and the SRA’s new approach to ongoing learning.
There are varied reasons to begin the process of implementing an ESG programme. Preparing your business for an ESG programme could be driven by a variety of different factors. Your business might be looking for investment or might want to attract the best talent as an employer of choice.
One example of a driver is because of a scandal or tragedy. The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013 led to the death of more than 1,100 workers. This event put intense public pressure on international clothing retailers, questioning practices across the industry, independent of whether the retailer had sourced from this facility. Fashion retailers have taken concerted action to improve safety in their supply chains, even if they are several tiers removed.
Continue reading2021 was an auspicious year for EssentialSkillz. In our mission to deliver more value to our customers, we released multiple updates to the WorkWize compliance platform, alongside a raft of new courses and improvements. In this blog, we put the spotlight on some of the highlights that were accomplished by the efforts of our fantastic team over the last year.
Our team has worked hard to roll out new features and improvements to enhance the user experience on WorkWize. Some of these improvements include:
At EssentialSkillz, we ensure that our courses provide the best learning experience and are up to date with the latest compliance regulations and best practices. In 2021, we were pleased to expand our extensive library of courses with the release of an additional 5 new courses and 15 course updates.
New courses from 2021 are:
2021 course updates included:
We also have a mobile friendly upgrade available. Now you can choose to upgrade your courses to get a better user experience when using mobile devices for learning.
Our development team have been working behind the scenes on new microlearning features that are soon to be released for our customers. Clients who use Author will soon be able to create Compliance Memos or Learning Nuggets to distribute short pieces of content to their users from within the WorkWize platform. Learning Nuggets also give users the ability to access short, mobile-friendly from anywhere.
Winning this award for the second time is a great tribute to the efforts of the outstanding Customer Support team at EssentialSkillz. Over the past two years, they have delivered an outstanding service, providing our clients with technical expertise, reliability and empathy at a time when businesses really needed it.
At EssentialSkillz, we value the importance of cyber security and are committed to providing our customers with the best possible protection. Here is a list of some of the yearly certifications and tests that were carried out in 2021:
Towards the beginning of Q4, EssentialSkillz was acquired by Marlowe plc, the UK leader in business-critical services and software which assure safety and regulatory compliance. EssentialSkillz will act as a platform for Marlowe’s compliance software businesses as a key part of its governance, risk and compliance division. More information on Marlowe plc can be found at: www.marloweplc.com/about.
At EssentialSkillz, we have a strong commitment towards sustainability and good ethical practises. In 2021, our efforts were recognised by the EcoVadis program, which gave us a silver award and placed us within the top 25% of companies that participated. We are very proud of this achievement and look to improve our score in the future as we do our part to mitigate our impact on the environment.
As part of a settlement agreement with the SRA, a large SRA regulated firm has been fined £232,500 for money laundering breaches. The firm has also been ordered to pay the SRA investigation costs of £50,000.
Between September 2015 and September 2018 the SRA found that the firm in question carried out serious breaches of the relevant money laundering regulations and the SRA’s rules. These included:
Covid-19 is still around, but a combination of more knowledge about how the virus works plus widely available vaccines and boosters have allowed many workplaces to return, at least partially, to a more normal, if sometimes changed and updated, routine.
Vaccines are not a legal requirement in most sectors, but the government has instructed employers to recommend and encourage staff to be vaccinated. Employers should be thinking about how they encourage vaccination, even if there is no legal requirement. A company might share practical information about how to get vaccinated, post information on company sources, and allow workers to take time off to be vaccinated. Employers should also consider how to ensure their sick leave policies and procedures do not disincentivize workers from getting vaccinated. This could include concerns about side effects, and enabling staff to take a limited amount of time off after a vaccine if they suffer from a side effect, without necessarily having to provide a sick note.
How does your business define fully vaccinated? Do you expect staff to get boosters? Do you give time off for shots, or have incentives for those that get boosted?
These are some of the most important questions facing employers during the current Omicron wave and afterwards as people return to the office.
It’s important to have a strong vaccine policy at work, which is flexible and ready to incorporate new legal guidance around mandates as well as booster shots. This could be as simple as updating policies from “double-jabbed” to “fully vaccinated” to avoid confusion as definitions change.
If you don’t have a comprehensive vaccinations policy you can download our template and use it for free. Customise it with your organisation’s own incentives and procedures for encouraging vaccinations and meeting your duty of care to staff.
Say goodbye to fragmented processes and manage all your filing obligations with Omnitrack
Omnitrack is a powerful yet flexible data collection and reporting tool. Its established use cases include an AML client onboarding workflow, a gift and hospitality register, and a GDPR compliance suite. VinciWorks has also recently launched the Omnitrack Filing Calendar, which means you can now use one system to track all filing obligations, send reminder notifications and upload documents evidencing compliance.
Before we take a closer look at the Omnitrack Filing Calendar and one of its template workflows, this blog will outline some of the key challenges compliance staff face when managing filing obligations.
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