Business Travel Compliance | A Complete Guide to Managing Risks
In the last 20 years, business travel compliance has become a minefield of complexity and risk. Here’s how that happened – and how to ensure adherence to corporate travel policies that keep the dangers at bay.
4 March 2025 | Alex Schulte
The world was simpler in 2005.
20 years ago, the very first video was uploaded to YouTube, the Star Wars prequels were just winding down, and the Blackberry 8700 was the height of handheld technological sophistication.
Veterans in the field of Global Mobility may look fondly back on a more specific aspect of the world of two decades ago: the straightforwardness of business travel.
In the intervening time, the basic task of finding the information required to get staff moving across borders compliantly has swelled to huge proportions. For large enterprises with large numbers of staff on the go, the potential risk factors multiply to almost impossible levels.
So how did we get here —and what can we do about it?
Let’s wade through the quagmire of business travel compliance—how and why it’s more complicated than ever before, a checklist of travel risks to look out for, and what you can do what you can do right now to radically simplify everything.
Clearance Processes
Getting your staff member an eligible visa, work permit or making arrangements for a ‘posted worker notification’ (official EU terminology for an intra-company transfer within the bloc) should be straightforward. It isn’t.
Visas and Work Permit Compliance
Depending on where your staff are going, where they’re coming from, and for what purpose, they’ll need one of the following options:
- Nothing beyond their passport
- Pre-arrival clearance
- A single visa
- A visa and a work permit
- A posted worker notification
Here are a few examples to make sense of this complexity.
1. Passport only
Let’s say you’re a British staff member at a London-based company heading to Dubai for a conference. You won’t be doing much in the way of directly productive work, other than networking and other types of schmoozing.
Congratulations, you can go right through. The UAE will stamp your passport on arrival with a free visa valid for up to 30 days.
2. Pre-arrival clearance
Now, let’s say you’re a Dutch executive heading from company HQ in Rotterdam to the UK for a trade show at London’s ExCel Centre.
You won’t need a UK visa, as you’re from an EU country and therefore have visa-free access. But you will need to have gone through the UK’s Electronic Travel Authorisation process (ETA). This digital process will verify your identity and clear you as valid to enter the UK, providing there’s nothing compromising in your personal history.
3. A single visa
Now put yourself in the shoes of an American worker embarking on a three-month secondment to the UK to lead a digital transformation project at your company’s London branch office. In that case, you would likely need the Senior or Specialist Worker visa; part of the Global Business Mobility visa route.
This document would double as both a visa, in the sense of granting entry to and residence in the UK, and a work permit, in that it allows you to carry out paid employment in the UK.
4. A visa and a work permit
For our next example, please assume the role of a Chinese national, employed by a Canadian company, who is on secondment, at a non-senior level, to head office in Toronto for a year.
In this case, you would need both a Temporary Resident Visa to ensure you can stay in the country and an Employer-Specific Work Permit. To acquire the latter, your employer would have to obtain a positive Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) from the authorities and provide your biometric personal information, plus financial information that proves you can support yourself while you stay in Canada.
But if you were assigned for a transfer a senior or executive level, you would most likely be LMIA-exempt. The same goes if you were from a country with which Canada has signed a free trade agreement, like Mexico through the CUSMA treaty.
Confused yet?
Posted Worker Notification Compliance
For assignments within the EU and Schengen Area, things work a little differently. This merits its own section to explain.
Let’s imagine an employee at a company in Austria travelling from her home in Vienna to Paris for a two-month assignment.
Long before she steps onto the train, her employer will have delivered a posted worker notification to the French labour inspectorate. This will feature every morsel of pertinent information about the posting, plus extensive documentation of her employment history, all translated into French.
The company will also need to have appointed a representative on French soil to liaise with employment authorities in the case of inspections.
All this before a moment of work can begin. And when clerical errors can result in fines of €4,000 per worker, checking all this back will take up a further chunk of time and effort.
This is due to the EU Posted Workers Directive (Directive EU 2018/957), which came into effect in 2020. In a swoop, it standardised the protocols around posting workers within the EU, adding a new set of business travel compliance obligations.
20 years ago, this process was far less structured. At the time, employers were required to notify host countries, yet there was no standardised system for doing so. This meant enforcement was famously patchy, and many firms were able to circumvent what few compliance obligations existed.
Not so now, and for good reason.
With so many variables at play, knowing what you need to travel in Europe, North America and beyond was difficult even back in the noughties. But with the spread of digital and biometric-based processes, plus a slew of new trade arrangements across the world, it’s even more head-spinning to get a handle on now.
Digitalisation
Arranging business travel now typically means navigating some rather tricky digital application and clearance systems.
When travelling for short stays on a visa-free basis to hubs like the UK, USA and Europe, you’ll need to complete a pre-clearance process. The United States’ introduction of the ESTA waiver system fired the starting gun on this global transition back in 2009.
Now, in 2025, digital border systems are rolling out across the world en masse. These include eVisas as well as electronic pre-clearance systems for visa-free travellers.
Such tools have allowed authorities much greater visibility of who is passing across their borders, for what purposes and for how long.
But their proliferation forces Global Mobility managers to learn the ropes of a growing list of different national and supranational digital infrastructures, which are rarely interoperable. The processes will vary considerably from country to country, making a unified, transferable approach difficult.
The time spent gathering and uploading documents and filling in these online forms can be as onerous as the manual processes common at entry ports 20 years ago.
Cybersecurity and Data Privacy
Then, there’s the question of data privacy and cybersecurity. Regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now impose strict rules on how companies can process sensitive data. But these are not harmonised globally. In practice, this means that the information gathered for USA ESTA applications may need to be reprocessed or handled differently for applications to travel in Europe.
If businesses collect data in one jurisdiction (e.g., Europe) to submit it for use in another (e.g., U.S.), they must ensure compliance with international transfer rules under GDPR or similar frameworks (e.g., UK GDPR). This involves safeguards like Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) or adequacy decisions.
These border digitalisation systems are also updated frequently as national immigration rules change. This can leave teams with unanticipated new hurdles for processes they thought were familiar.
Border digitalisation has streamlined much of the travel compliance burden. But it has also created new pinch points.
Predictive Enforcement
One consequence of smarter border control systems is that governments can automatically spot irregular travel.
Each person passing through a digital border leaves a unique trace of data. Given the number of people crossing borders at any major airport each day, authorities can rely on a vast database of travel patterns. This gives enforcement agencies the capacity to embrace big data and predictive AI to police business travel compliance in ways that were not possible 20 years ago.
An individual who, say, visits the same foreign office every month for meetings might trigger an alert for closer inspection of their activities. The reasons for this pattern might be perfectly legitimate, but may still create onerous delays for those caught by the algorithm and subjected to questioning by border officials.
On top of this, governments increasingly share travel data. The US and Canada exchange entry information so that each country’s authorities know when a traveller has exited the other. This helps identify visa overstays or repeated “visa runs”. Biometric exit information, based on facial recognition to confirm each departure, can also catch those who don’t leave on time.
This all adds up to a regime of predictive enforcement. Governments now have the ability to proactively identify compliance violations in advance, rather than retrospectively. Cross-border cooperation in data sharing reaches across immigration and tax authorities. This means a compliance lapse in one country can quickly come to the attention of others.
Global Mobility teams now have to worry that a minor compliance oversight could cascade into a pattern of delays and regulatory attention. None of this was even possible around the turn of the century, and the technology is still only really getting started. The room for error has shrunk to zero.
National Caps and Quotas
Here’s an unhappy scenario to chew over. Your company wants to expand nationally, with some big capital investments planned. A tight labour market makes it hard to hire enough staff with the right skills to support these new investments, so you look to hire from abroad. The workers are out there and they’re ready and willing to come over. But your country caps the number of foreign workers allowed to migrate each year, and that year’s cap has already been exceeded. You are not able to get the proper work authorisation for your new prospective hires. Suddenly, plans that seemed eminently achievable become impossible. The project is shelved and the company’s growth prospects are diminished.
This is a routine reality in many countries. In the US, for instance, the main skilled work visa (H-1B) is limited to 85,000 new issues per year, a quota that is often oversubscribed within days of opening. In the context of a domestic dearth of technical skills, this upper bound on immigration has put the brakes on an untold number of projects.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means. Indeed, the H-1B visa cap was reduced in 2004 to its current levels. But restrictionist policies are advancing across the world. Singapore’s dependency ratio ceiling sets a cap on the percentage of foreign workers in a company’s workforce, depending on sector. Between 2020 and 2021, this was reduced for firms in the services sector from 40% to 35%, creating staffing shortages and cost pressures.
Similarly, Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program has recently lowered the maximum number of low-wage temporary foreign workers a company can employ from 20% to no more than 10% of their workforce.
Across the world, the febrile political climate of the 2020s is making it harder for Global Mobility teams to leverage immigration in support of their company’s commercial plans. With the second Trump term in full swing, this trend shows little sign of slowing down.
Sustainability
Companies don’t only have to monitor the number of people they can get on the move. They also have to account for the emissions they create in doing so.
Carbon reporting is a new facet of business travel compliance that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago.
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) mandates that large companies disclose their environmental impact, including emissions from business travel (a part of “Scope 3” emissions).
Likewise, laws like California’s Climate Accountability Act will force companies to report all greenhouse gas emissions, travel included. Travel now shows up in audited reports and sustainability scores, with penalties for non-reporting or misreporting.
Other legislative pressures lie further upstream from business operations, but still make travel more difficult. In Europe, airlines on intra-EU routes already face emission cap-and-trade costs, indirectly raising prices on carbon-heavy travel.
France has even banned certain short-haul domestic flights to cut emissions, adding new complexities to travel routing.
While not a traditional compliance topic like visas or tax, sustainability requirements mean travel managers must track and report environmental metrics just as meticulously as they do immigration documents.
Tax Traps and Permanent Establishment Risks
Business travel can be expensive beyond the upfront costs. There’s always a lurking risk of triggering an unwanted tax obligation.
Tax authorities worldwide have become more aggressive in taxing income earned by visiting employees, no matter how short the trip. The mechanism of choice? Stricter rules around Permanent Establishment (PE): the threshold at which a business is determined to have a taxable presence in another country.
In theory, a short business-related trip to another country should not trigger a PE risk. However, the regulations in many countries have become so intricate that it is now easy to land yourself with a new tax burden inadvertently.
In India, a foreign employee doing even a day’s work for a local affiliate can create a PE. Doing work for a client counts toward a 90-day threshold cumulatively across all employees of the company. That means if multiple team members travel to India for the same project, their days all add up collectively.
Here in the UK, negotiating contracts while on a short visit will entitle His Majesty’s Revenue Collection to a share of any subsequent profits.
This wasn’t always so.
In the world of 20 years ago, tax treaties often allowed exemptions if a person stayed under 183 days and was paid from abroad. The ‘six-month rule’ thus became a commonplace among frequent corporate travellers as a carte blanche for all sorts of activities.
This assumption remains persistent despite being dangerously outdated. As a result, Global Mobility teams need easy reference to involuted tax rulebooks from across the world. They must also stay particularly vigilant towards employees’ activities. Any innocent missteps could turn an international assignment into a significant, ongoing tax liability.
How to Simplify Business Travel Compliance
All of these factors have aligned in recent decades to make business travel compliance particularly complicated and onerous. The practical task of compliance has shifted from a reactive, post-hoc checklist to a continuous burden of proactively mitigating for emergent risks.
But this gets harder with each passing year. New laws pop up around the world, new systems are implemented and familiar techniques become obsolete. As companies’ global footprints grow and more employees get on the move, staying on top of all the potential compliance risks across all these dimensions can seem almost impossible.
There needs to be some way of making this all easier.
Now there is.
Centuro Global’s Travel Compliance Assistant unifies and simplifies every part of managing compliant business travel. This unique, self-serve software allows each employee to independently assess the best option for their trip. That might be an entry visa, business visa, work permit or Posted Workers notification.
The Travel Compliance Assistant will scan their passport, review their travel history and even assess their CV and salary. It uses all this information to create a personalised recommendation for which documents they will need.
The tool also flags potential immigration and tax compliance issues in advance, feeding on our dynamic database of the latest regulatory changes from across the world.
The end result is a strategic blueprint, personalised for each employee, for how to enter any country, for any purpose.
The complete assessment can then be provided to our in-house legal team to execute at scale.
No more ambiguity, no more mishaps, just complete business travel compliance intelligence straight out of the box.
Want to see the Travel Compliance Assistant in action?
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