Vendor Compliance

Ensuring that vendors meet all compliance standards with your VMS.

Many companies incorrectly believe that the responsibility for ensuring proper worker classification and addressing other regulatory compliance issues rests with the employer of record, often a staffing vendor or service provider. But In reality, if a compliance issue arises, the regulatory authority will follow the relationship from the worker to the recipient of the work product, including the hiring company.

All it takes is one claim asserting that a worker has been misclassified and should be an employee of the client company, or one workers compensation claim due to a work-related injury, and these claims could lead to an audit or even potential legal liability for the client company.

For these reasons, it is vitally important for a contingent workforce program to ensure that its vendors are compliant with all applicable laws and regulations. Your vendor management system (VMS) can help to ensure your vendors meet these standards.

Vetting and Compliance Process

Beeline oversees, documents, and systematises the vetting and compliance of all your suppliers. Our vendor compliance team has created a supplier vetting process and services designed to enhance your audit capabilities and help you manage suppliers more efficiently. Vendor compliance services include:

• Vetting Requests
• Contract Management
• Amendment Tracking

Our VMS has an online portal through which all supplier contracts are originated and maintained. The portal provides supplier onboarding, payment requirements, and contract compliance. The portal securely maintains all required documentation, including all financial information when managing supplier payments. This provides an auditable system of record for your supplier contracts, as with all essential data in a repository for supplier contract management.

You can be confident knowing all suppliers with access to your VMS must first go through the vendor compliance online portal and execute your approved Supplier Access and Services Agreement before gaining access to your site. Our compliance team works to ensure that each supplier executes the correct client contract, along with any other required documents. This ensures that all suppliers meet your pre-defined requirements from a financial and legal perspective.

Why a Vendor Qualification Process is Necessary

It is vitally important for any organization engaging contingent labor to have a vendor qualification process in place to mitigate risk from a financial aspect. But ensuring vendor compliance is also important from a reputation standpoint. In too many cases, companies have seen their reputations damaged by news stories about workers being underpaid by subcontractors, and while the subcontractors’ names may be quickly forgotten, it is the brand name of the hiring company that is permanently damaged.

Having a vendor qualification process in place not only mitigates this unnecessary risk, but also help organizations bring on vendors quickly, efficiently and compliantly. With Beeline and our ecosystem of approved and vetted talent partners, you can be confident of operating a contingent workforce program that combines flexibility and cost savings with compliance risk mitigation.

Vetting Vendors for SOW-based Contracts

Enterprise clients frequently use large numbers of service providers and specialized consulting firms to perform projects involving hard-to-find worker skillsets. These projects are generally performed according to the terms of a statement of work (SOW) and the contractor may either be paid a fixed price or compensated on a time-and-materials basis. Due to their structures and the employment relationship of their workers, service providers can potentially introduce worker misclassification risk to the enterprise.

Using the services procurement capabilities of Beeline, companies can reduce these risks. Beeline allows organizations to select contractors by competitive bid and negotiate SOWs using their preferred terms, rather than the contractors’. This allows enterprises to establish firm and consistent compliance requirements for contractors and ensure that service providers meet client-defined standards for vendor status, including:

• Business license validation
• Credit check
• Certifications check
• Insurance validation
• Payroll and business tax compliance