Your suppliers are the heart of your contingent labor program so making sure that your vendors are compliant is imperative to the health of your extended workforce. We all think we have our ducks in a row until we don’t, which is why we recommend taking an active approach to your vendor management.
Whether you are using a Managed Service Provider (MSP), handling your program in-house, or are using a hybrid program management model like VectorVMS’s Shared Managed Services (SMS) you should always be aware of the compliance surrounding your vendors. We recommend the following three audits at a regular cadence to make sure your program vendors are fully compliant with your program requirements.
- Candidate Compliance Completion
- Contract Management
- Pay Rate Comparisons
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
RELATED READING | ‘Using Technology to Master Contingent Workforce Compliance’
Candidate Compliance Completion
In previous articles, we have stressed the importance of compliance management at the candidate level and how to track those items for future reference in your vendor management system. While this process can and should be tracked through technology, a human touch is always important. Even when an item is marked as complete we have seen errors in the compliance items such as:
- The wrong document being uploaded
- Documents submitted without signatures
- Typed signatures when hand-written/electronic is required
- Personal information was uploaded where it should not be
To mitigate these issues, our clients have conducted two-part audits. The first allows the user to run reports in the vendor management system to track incomplete or expiring compliance. The second requires an audit of the submitted compliance to check for vendors that seem to struggle to complete the compliance items that meet the standards of the client.
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Contract Management
Making sure you have the right information on hand can help you determine where your contracts stand with your vendors. A great place to track this information is in your VMS. Storing the contracts on the vendors’ records makes it easier to maintain all of the data you need around vendor status. Documents you may want to track for your vendors include:
- Master Service Agreement / Staffing Agreement
- Certificate of Insurance
- Diversity Status Tracking
These items should be audited or tracked frequently to ensure you are not putting yourself at risk by working with vendors whose compliance documentation has expired.
MORE FROM THE BLOG | ‘6 Steps to Prepare for a Vendor Compliance Audit’
Pay Rate Comparisons
It’s really up to you to determine if pay rate comparison is something you want to track. Some organizations only care to see into the bill rate align with the contract while others want to ensure that the pay rate and markup align with the contracted rates. There is no right way, but if pay-rate monitoring is something you are interested in this is where we would recommend an audit. While finding discrepancies does not happen often, if it does happen, you would want to know.
This does not mean that you need to check every timesheet that comes through the system, but an occasional audit can help you determine if there are any patterns in vendors that have made an oversight in the candidate pay rate compared to the contracted pay rate.
Auditing for Compliance Excellence
Regardless of how you audit, it is important to keep a close eye on the components of your program that are most important to you. Compliance, contract, and pay rate audits are just one way to make sure that your program standards are up to snuff.
If you want to know more about contingent workforce program compliance, download our ebook ‘6 Key Compliance Categories for All Contingent Workforce Programs’.
Meet the Expert
Taylor Ramchandani – VP of Strategy
Taylor Ramchandani is responsible for the management and strategic planning of the VectorVMS vendor management system. Taylor is committed to client satisfaction and to ensuring VectorVMS technology meets the current and future needs of clients and managed service providers (MSPs). She uses market research and in-depth industry experience to create products and services that make extended workforce management efficient and intuitive. Taylor oversees product development, marketing, and business partnerships for VectorVMS and is responsible for driving innovation for contingent workforce management. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
