The law has quietly shifted the consequences of a visa breach onto employers. Immigration lawyer Maggie Taaffe explains what a defensible right-to-work check looks like, and why a photocopied passport isn’t one.
Ask most publicans whether they employ anyone on a visa, and you may get a confident answer about the kitchen. Ask about the floor, and the answer gets vaguer.
That lack of clarity is the issue. In a typical venue, a significant portion of the roster consists of students on student visas, working holidaymakers, employer-sponsored workers, and graduates. Each of these visas has conditions regarding the amount of work allowed, who may perform it, and for how long. None of these conditions is visible on a passport.
Allowing a person to work in breach of a visa condition is an offence by the employer, and the penalties apply to the business. At the serious end, an operator can be fined, sanctioned, declared a prohibited employer, barred from employing temporary visa holders for a set period, and have their business name and ABN published on a public register.
That is no longer hypothetical. In September 2025, a Perth food business, Eatalian Deli, became the first employer publicly named under the strengthened compliance regime and was barred from employing migrant workers for five years. For a group that has spent two years and a considerable amount of money building a migrant kitchen brigade, that is not just a fine. That marks the end of their workforce strategy.
The uncomfortable part is that most breaches I see are not deliberate.
Examples where it actually goes wrong
The peak-trade roster. A student visa holder can work unlimited hours during scheduled breaks in their course, and 48 hours a fortnight once classes resume. From behind the bar, those two states look identical. A venue short-staffed over summer offers extra shifts to a reliable barista who says yes and keeps offering them into February, after the student visa holder’s term has quietly resumed. Nobody is counting. The student’s visa is now at risk, and so is the venue, over a decision made by a duty manager at 4pm on a Friday.
The second job. A worker works shifts at your venue and at a café down the road. Your rostering system only records your hours. The 48-hour limit includes both.
The person you never onboarded. Not every visa carries work rights. A visitor visa comes with condition 8101, no work at all, and some bridging visas have no work rights. The exposure here is rarely the formal hire, because that runs through payroll. It is the trial shift, the mate of the sous chef who fills in on a Saturday, the partner who helps out over a big weekend. Under the Migration Act, work means any work, for reward or not. An unpaid trial is work, and if the person had no right to do it, the venue allowed it.
The photocopy. Many venues hold a folder of passport scans and believe that is a right-to-work check. It isn’t. A passport tells you who someone is. It tells you nothing about their current visa status or the conditions attached to it.
What a defensible system looks like
The standard is not “did you have good intentions”. It is more about whether you could demonstrate that you took reasonable steps to verify entitlement at the point of hire and throughout the employment process.
In practice, there are four things.
Check the visa, and the identity. Use VEVO — the Department’s free Visa Entitlement Verification Online service, at the point of hire. It returns the visa holder’s current status and conditions. Get their consent and their passport details and run it yourself, as we don’t recommend employee-provided VEVO checks.
Record the check. A dated VEVO record on the employment file. If you cannot produce evidence of the check, for practical purposes, the check did not happen. Do it at least every three months.
Diarise the expiry and conditions. Every visa has an end date, and many have work conditions. Put them in the same system that manages RSA renewals and food safety supervisor certificates. Same discipline, different piece of paper.
Connect it to the roster. This is the one venues skip and the one that matters most. If your rostering system doesn’t flag that an employee has an hours cap, the cap will be exceeded during the first busy week. The control must be with the person making the roster, not in a compliance folder opened only once a year.
The objection
Publicans and venue operators will point out, fairly, that this is another compliance layer on an industry already carrying award interpretation, gaming regulation, liquor licensing, food safety and now psychosocial hazard obligations.
Two responses. The first is Eatalian Deli. The second, and more useful: the venues that get this right tend to be the venues that can sponsor. Sponsorship approval depends on your employer record. An operator with clean systems has a workforce option that an operator with a folder of passport scans and sloppy employee monitoring does not, and with ‘Chef’ now the single most nominated occupation in Australia’s temporary skilled visa program, that option has real commercial value.
The checks take a few minutes. The system to keep it current takes an afternoon to set up. When compared to the cost of losing the ability to sponsor, that is not a close call.
