25 July 2025 | By Alex Schulte
As every Global Mobility professional knows, managing international assignments is no picnic. Between sorting the right visas, getting tax-compliant, and keeping tabs on paperwork, getting employees ready feels like you’re spinning too many plates. And if you drop one, you could end up in serious trouble.
Companies who send employees abroad will always face the prospect of audits. In major markets across the world, including the UK, US, Canada and Australia, national authorities are subjecting employers to much higher scrutiny.
If the auditors arrive, you need to be ready. But it’s much harder to present an inspection-ready face to the world if you’ve not been systematic about documenting your compliance.
That’s why it’s essential to build robust and traceable compliance practices throughout the assignment process. This is so much easier with a digital-first approach.
This checklist will guide you through the essential steps of preparing your employees for assignments, with tips to help you stay compliant and audit-ready throughout the process.
✅ 1. Visa and Work Permit Compliance: Centralise, Track, and Streamline
Visa and work permit compliance are the most fundamental part of international assignment compliance. If your relocated staff don’t have the right documents to live and work in the host country, your whole organisation will be vulnerable to penalties.
The problem is, too many teams still rely on manual, fragmented processes, such as spreadsheets, to track visa statuses and applications. Apart from being inefficient, this massively increases the risk of errors.
Audit-Ready Advice: Centralise your compliance management. Use an integrated immigration case management system to store and track every employee’s visa and work permit statuses. This will ensure you can quickly retrieve up-to-date documents and easily report on compliance during audits.
Pro Tip: Even short-term assignments or routine business travel can be subject to audits. Ensure your system can manage temporary travel and visa requirements to avoid compliance gaps.
✅ 2. Payroll and Tax Compliance: Stay Organised, Stay Compliant
Global payroll and tax compliance are among the most complicated aspects of arranging international assignments. With employees spread across multiple jurisdictions, tracking tax contributions and social security payments can easily fall through the cracks.
Audit-Ready Advice: Set up a global payroll solution that captures all relevant tax and social security contributions for each jurisdiction. A unified payroll system ensures all payments are tracked accurately, making audits easier.
Pro Tip: Don’t overlook salary thresholds, especially in countries like Japan, where salary levels are closely scrutinised during visa applications. Make sure your payroll system tracks these varying requirements.
✅ 3. Entity Setup: Get It Right from the Start
Setting up a new entity in a foreign market isn’t straightforward. Many businesses struggle with establishing legal entities, securing tax registrations, and meeting local compliance requirements. Without a watertight legal entity, you’ll open yourself up to fines and struggle to staff your operation.
Audit-Ready Advice: Ensure you complete tax and social security registrations as part of the entity setup process. Working with experienced legal advisors will help you avoid costly delays and disruptions.
Pro Tip: Tackle compliance issues early by ensuring visa sponsorship and labour law compliance are in place from day one. A proactive approach will reduce risk and ensure a smooth process when hiring in a new market.
✅ 4. Simplify Communication: Empower Employees with Access to Information
Lack of clarity is a common stumbling block. Employees often struggle to keep track of their visa statuses, assignments, and related documentation. This uncertainty leads to repeated follow-up inquiries, which only add to HR’s workload.
Audit-Ready Advice: Implement an automated notification system within your compliance platform. This system will send real-time updates to employees on the status of their visa applications and assignments, with reminders of when documents are due for renewal. This will reduce HR’s time spent answering questions.
Pro Tip: Transparency reduces stress. Provide employees with access to real-time information through a self-service portal or regular updates.
✅ 5. Cross-Border Relocation: Streamline Complex Processes
Managing just one international assignments is no easy feat. But today’s Global Mobility professionals have to manage multiple relocations across borders, simultaneously. As volumes grow, the complexity can start to feel prohibitive. That’s why it’s so important to let digital processes take the load.
Audit-Ready Advice: Use a workflow automation tool to track, manage, and coordinate cross-border moves. Automating key processes like document collection and visa submission gives your team the headspace to handle unexpected snags without missing a beat.
Pro Tip: Use a platform that integrates all processes – immigration, payroll, and entity setup – to eliminate silos. This will provide a holistic overview of all assignments and reduce the risk of missed deadlines or incomplete submissions.
✅ 6. Stay On Top of Regulatory Changes: Keep Your Team Updated
The laws and regulations that govern cross-border mobility can change in the blink of an eye. Organisations with a large global footprint can struggle to keep up with new immigration laws, tax obligations, and local compliance requirements across their branches. But any oversights can surface in the form of delays to important projects – or even penalties from auditors.
Audit-Ready Advice: Set up a system for monitoring regulatory changes in the countries where your employees are located. Automated alerts will notify HR when regulations change, ensuring your business stays compliant without constantly searching for updates.
Investing in an AI-enabled knowledge hub will also allow you to retrieve the latest regulatory information in an instant.
Pro Tip: Regularly review and update your internal policies and compliance strategies as new regulatory information emerges. Integrating the latest changes into your playbook will help you avoid compliance gaps that could compromise your audit-readiness.
✅ 7. Continuously Improve Your Operation: Get the Most out of Your Data
Once your core processes – visa compliance, payroll, entity setup – are in place, it’s time to keep an eye on trends and nip emerging issues in the bud. But instead of treating each case in isolation as a box-ticking exercise, you should use data on your whole operation to anticipate issues and tighten controls, long before any auditors rear their heads. Analytics tools are a modern Global Mobility professional’s best friend.
Audit-Ready Advice:
- Build a dashboard of key metrics: average permit turnaround time, number of overdue filings, rate of cross‑border assignment errors, etc.
- Review these figures monthly. Investigate any spikes. If one country’s permit times suddenly increase, adjust your staffing or timelines before an audit flags the problem.
Pro Tip: Historical data can predict future bottlenecks. For instance, if you notice permit approvals slowing in a specific region, you might pre‑prepare extra documentation or reassign resources there. Over time, this close attention to the data will keep your global mobility programme efficient and audit‑ready.
Stay Compliant, Stay Audit-Ready
International assignments don’t have to be a compliance nightmare. By building streamlined, automated processes for visa management, payroll compliance, tax tracking, and entity setup, you can kill two birds with one stone: reducing the risk of non-compliance and improving your overall efficiency. Centralising everything with a tech-driven system will help ensure you’re audit-ready, no matter how complex your international operations become.
Contact us today to learn how Centuro Global’s integrated Global Mobility operating system can help you stay compliant, avoid penalties, and keep your international assignments on track.
