The Situation
Leading organisations across the globe have embraced the shift towards engaging highly skilled, highly mobile contingent workers to help their competitive position in today’s global economy.
However, due to COVID-19, employers are experiencing a talent shortage for critical niche roles across all industries, brought about by the difficulty to source contingent workers from overseas. With border closures, flight cancellations and issues with obtaining visas, it’s harder than ever to fly contingent workers into the country to perform work.
For roles where tasks can be completed remotely, some companies are opting to engage workers to perform work from offshore. While this is solving the talent shortage, it introduces additional complexity around taxation, exchange rates, contracts and insurance.
CXC has been providing and supporting organisations with immigration, tax, advisory and administrative services for over 30 years. With over 30 local offices and services extending to over 50 countries, CXC has the resources, scale and flexibility to manage contractors throughout the world.
CXC's Solution
CXC assists corporate clients to engage, manage and pay contractors in regions around the world, including Americas, Europe, South Africa and Asia Pacific. These contractors work remotely on projects based in Australia and New Zealand.
Clients are eager to source international contractors as quickly as possible to gain access to sought after skills. We assist them in ensuring a contractor is engaged and onboarded efficiently, while also protecting the client from complex global regulations.
Once the client finds a candidate, and provides us with a rate, start and end date, location and hours they’ll be working, CXC begins our engagement process for international workers. We assess:
- Whether the contractor is engaged as employed (where CXC acts as the employer of the contractor) or self-employed (where we treat them like a subcontractor).
- The country’s legislation and entitlements, ensuring the contract meets these requirements.
- The in-country tax and social security payments needed.
- Goods and services tax (GST) / value-added tax (VAT) implications.
- Currency exchanges for cross-border transactions.
- Facilitating background checks and ensuring the contractor has a right to work.
When a contractor is due for extension, we assess changes in workforce legislation and amend their contract to ensure we comply to local and international legislative directives.
The Results
CXC now engages, manages and payrolls 50+ international workers for the likes of Deloitte, NBN Co. Origin Energy, News Corp, The Iconic, Glencore, EY and more. These workers cover a variety of different roles and industries, from IT, to engineers, to project managers.
Depending on the country, CXC also has the ability to provide additional services such as sponsor work visas, relocation and salary packaging.
Across CXC’s contractor workforce, we have seen a 77% increase in contingent workers working remotely. We ensure they have access to their systems, issuing required work permits and increasing activities to support their mental health.
