HMRC now shares payroll data directly with the Home Office. Pay and rostered hours are checked against the visa continuously, so small admin gaps can trigger queries before anyone internally has noticed them.
If you're sponsoring care workers, there's a change worth knowing about. HMRC now shares payroll data directly with the Home Office.
Pay rate and rostered hours have to match what's on the visa, and mismatches can surface almost immediately, well before an inspection would have caught them.
A rota that didn't quite line up with recorded hours used to be something you'd catch on a routine check and correct quietly. With the data link in place, a discrepancy can trigger a query before anyone internally has noticed it.
Why sponsor licence risk has increased for care providers
Sponsored workers make up a significant share of the care workforce at many providers. A lost sponsorship licence can cost a provider 15 to 20% of their workforce overnight, not just one employee. We've seen cases where a single large provider lost 600 staff in a single day after a licence was revoked.
Inspections used to give providers some breathing room to explain or correct a discrepancy. Pay rate and hours are now checked against the visa record continuously, not periodically, so that breathing room has largely gone.
Common payroll and rostering errors that trigger Home Office queries
The kind of thing that trips providers up is usually mundane, not deliberate:
- A shift gets swapped, and the rota isn't updated to reflect it
- Overtime gets paid but isn't logged against the right hours
- A pay rise takes effect, but the change doesn't get reflected consistently across payroll and rostering systems
- A sponsored worker goes on long-term sick leave or maternity leave and their salary drops, but the reporting duty to the Home Office isn't completed
That last one catches people out more than they expect. Reduced pay during an absence is often legitimate and expected, but if it isn't reported, HMRC's payroll data will simply show a sponsored worker being paid below their visa threshold. That looks like a breach on paper even when nothing has actually gone wrong, and it's the provider's job to have flagged it, not the Home Office's job to have assumed the best.
Any one of these can now be the thing that surfaces first, before it's caught internally.
How to audit sponsored worker payroll for compliance
A useful exercise for any provider sponsoring care workers: pick a handful of sponsored staff at random and check that what's rostered matches what's paid, on paper, down to the exact hour.
If that check throws up gaps, or you're not confident you could produce a clean answer for every sponsored worker on your books, treat it as a priority rather than something to get to eventually.
Lifted's compliance team helps care providers catch discrepancies like these before the Home Office does. If you want a second pair of eyes on your sponsored worker payroll and rostering data, get in touch.
About the author
Hollie Rae · Compliance Lead
Hollie spent nearly two decades as a Home Office sponsor compliance inspector before joining Lifted, and leads on sponsorship and Home Office compliance for providers on the platform.
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