Ask a UK hiring manager whether they've checked a new hire's right to work, and most will say yes without hesitation, because they know they have to. Ask whether they've verified that the same candidate actually held the job listed on their CV, for the dates claimed, and the answer is usually a pause, followed by something like "we assumed so, the CV looked fine." Those two checks get talked about as though they're the same category of thing: the government confirming something about a worker. They are not the same thing, they don't draw on the same data, and only one of them is actually required by law.
Right to work is a legal obligation, not a background check
Under UK law, employers must check that every new hire has the legal right to work in the UK before employment starts. This isn't optional due diligence, it's a statutory requirement, and the Home Office can fine an employer up to £20,000 per illegal worker for getting it wrong. For candidates who hold a UK immigration status recorded digitally, the check usually happens through an online share code the candidate generates and hands to the employer. For British and Irish passport holders, the more common route now is Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT), run through a certified provider, which checks that the passport itself is genuine and belongs to the person presenting it.
What this check confirms, precisely, is immigration and work status: this person is legally allowed to be employed in this country, as of this date. It says nothing about where they've worked before, what they did there, or whether the job titles on their CV are accurate. It was never designed to.
What HMRC PAYE records can add, and where the line sits
Separately, and with the individual's consent, HMRC PAYE records can confirm that a named person was on a given employer's payroll during a specific date range. That's a real, useful fact: it tells you the role existed, under that employer, for roughly those dates, on record with the tax authority rather than on a CV the candidate wrote themselves. For a hiring manager trying to sanity check an employment history, that's meaningfully better evidence than a phone number and a hope that whoever answers will remember the candidate.
It's also narrow, and worth being precise about what it doesn't do. It doesn't replace the right-to-work check; the two run on entirely different legal bases, and completing one is not a substitute for the other. It doesn't reveal salary. It doesn't reveal performance, reason for leaving, or anything qualitative about how the person actually did the job. It confirms a fact about employment history: employer, dates, nothing more.
The two checks, side by side:
- Right to work: mandatory for every hire, confirms legal immigration and work status, done via online share code or IDVT, non-compliance carries fines up to £20,000.
- Employment history via HMRC PAYE: optional, requires candidate consent, confirms employer name and employment dates only, carries no penalty for skipping it because there is no legal requirement to do it at all.
That last point is the interesting one. Right to work got solved, organizationally, because the law forced it: every employer built a process, because the alternative was a fine. Employment history never got the same forcing function, so most employers still don't have a real process for it. They have a CV, and a general sense that people mostly don't lie about where they've worked, which is true often enough that nobody built the infrastructure to check the times it isn't. Right to work is verified as a matter of routine. Employment history is verified, in practice, mostly by trusting the document in front of you.
None of this means every employer needs to run a PAYE check on every hire. For many roles, the cost of a bad CV claim is low enough that trusting it is a reasonable trade-off. But for roles where employment history actually matters, management experience, regulated positions, anything where whether someone really did a job for that long changes the hiring decision, it's worth knowing the check exists, that it's distinct from the right-to-work process already in place, and that what it hands back is an employer name and a date range, not a character reference.