The documents required for a RTW check in the UK depend on the candidate's nationality and status.

• British and Irish citizens can use a valid passport, or for British nationals, a birth or adoption certificate combined with a National Insurance number.
• EEA and non-EEA nationals need to demonstrate their immigration status. For most, that means using the Home Office online service and providing a share code that gives you a live view of their right to work status.
• Zinc also supports the British Citizens and Northern Ireland (BC+NI) combined route, and accepts Indian Aadhaar and PAN cards for Indian nationals, validated via Entrust (formerly Onfido).

Employers who can't show a statutory excuse for hiring someone without the right to work face a civil penalty of up to £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach, rising to up to £60,000 for repeat breaches. These penalties come from the Home Office.

Where an employer is found to have knowingly employed someone without the right to work, it becomes criminal: up to five years in prison and an unlimited fine.

Zinc creates a complete, timestamped audit trail for every check, storing the documents reviewed, the result, and the date in your dashboard and any integrated ATS or HRIS. That audit trail is what you'd rely on to demonstrate a statutory excuse if your process was ever questioned.

When a candidate's right to work is time-limited, Zinc captures the expiry date at the point of the initial check and makes it visible in the candidate's record and in re-check schedules. As expiry approaches, Zinc alerts your team so you can start a follow-up check before the permission lapses.

For candidates on the Home Office share code route, re-checks reflect the live status of their permission at the time. All re-check history is stored in your dashboard as part of the ongoing compliance record.

Right to work checks can be automated through checking share codes, and imposter checks are often required as a complement to establish your statutory excuse.

In order to obtain a statutory excuse against a civil penalty, you must both independently verify the individual's right to work using the official online service yourself, and conduct an imposter check to ensure that the share code belongs to the individual you are looking to hire.

When candidates prove right to work via share code, Zinc will initially provide a result based on that share code. In many cases, the result will be listed as ‘Consider’, because the Home Office response includes conditions, restrictions, or expiry dates that require you as the employer to review. If there aren’t any conditions, the result will typically be marked ‘Clear’ in Zinc.

For candidates who provide a UK share code, Zinc displays the information supplied so that employers can review it as part of the screening process.

However, to establish your statutory excuse against illegal working penalties, you must:

1. Run the check yourself using the Home Office’s online RTW service
2. Confirm that the individual presenting for work matches the photograph shown, also known as an ‘impostor check’

Without these two things, you haven’t established your statutory excuse.

Both UK and global right to work checks through Zinc typically complete in one to two minutes. The candidate gets a secure link, completes their verification, and the result appears in your dashboard almost immediately.

Zinc's global right to work check uses passport-based identity validation for international candidates and runs at the same speed.

For UK share code checks, the result reflects live Home Office data. Returning candidates can reuse previously verified identity documents, which speeds things up further for re-hires and company-wide rechecks.

Zinc creates a timestamped record of every right to work check: the documents reviewed, the result, the date, and the expiry date of any time-limited permission.

That record lives in your Zinc dashboard and can be downloaded or delivered automatically to any integrated ATS or HRIS so you always have your statutory excuse ready to go. This process ensures your statutory excuse is established for each candidate, so long as you also carry out the imposter check.

UK employers need to keep right to work records for the duration of employment plus two years after someone leaves. Zinc stores these records throughout that period. If you're ever subject to a Home Office inspection, the audit trail Zinc creates is the evidence you need to demonstrate that compliant checks were carried out.