For a good chunk of my earlier career, I was the person employers didn’t want to hear from. I investigated Minimum Wage compliance for HMRC, the letters, the records requests, the meetings where someone’s payroll manager slid a ring binder across the table and hoped for the best. These days I sit on the other side of the fence, advising businesses on how to stay out of exactly the trouble I used to create for them. This unique perspective has led me to become an accidental translator between regulators and employers.

When people ask me whether the Fair Work Agency is just old wine in a new bottle, I have a fairly strong view, it isn’t, and the reasons why are more interesting than most of the generic commentary suggests.

The system used to wait, this one doesn’t

Here’s the quiet truth about enforcement as it was a decade ago: it was largely reactive. A worker had to complain, usually after they’d already left. A union might push. HMRC’s minimum wage team would pick up a case, often months or years after the underpayment happened. The various bodies, HMRC’s National Minimum Wage unit, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and others, each guarded their own patch. If you were an employer who never triggered a complaint, you could go a very long time without anyone looking at you at all.

The Fair Work Agency, live since 7 April 2026, was built to end that. It folds those separate functions into a single executive agency inside the Department for Business and Trade, and it arrived with more than a quarter more funding than its predecessor bodies had between them, the signal there is not subtle.

The shift that matters is from reactive to proactive and follows a pattern which the National Minimum Wage Unit have been forging over the past few years. The FWA doesn’t intend to wait for a whistle, it intends to pick its targets, by sector, by risk profile, by data, by region, and go looking.

The thing nobody wants to hear: most employers aren’t villains

This is where my two careers collide, because both taught me the same lesson from different angles. When I was investigating, the cartoon image, the employer deliberately robbing staff, was the rare case. Far more often I found honest businesses tripped up by the boring stuff, a salary sacrifice scheme that quietly dragged someone under the wage floor, a uniform deduction nobody had pressure-tested, working time that wasn’t being counted properly, accrued holiday calculated on a method that made sense to someone in 2015 and to no one since.

The government’s own Working Lives research backs this up with numbers that should give every employer food for thought. It was a serious piece of work, led by UCL, commissioned back in 2022 and reported in late 2025, built on a representative survey of workers across all four UK nations and mapping twelve separate forms of non-compliance and work-based harm. Minimum Wage violations ran at around 6% across the full workforce, rising to roughly one in seven, close to 15%, among precarious workers.

But look past the headline wage figures and you see the real shape of the problem. Nearly a quarter of the wider workforce reported not getting a contract on time or at all, and among precarious workers it was a third. Missing payslips climbed from under 5% of the general workforce to more than 17% of those in precarious work. Unfair deductions ran at roughly 14% across the board, closer to 22% at the sharp end. Annual Leave that just didn’t add up. These are administrative failures, not heists, and under the new regime an administrative failure can still cost you.

And here’s the figure that should stop any "well, that’s not us" reflex in its tracks. Unpaid extra hours were reported by almost a third of the entire workforce, slightly more, in fact, than among precarious workers. Read that again, the single most widespread money problem in the survey wasn’t tucked away in the gig economy or the back of a warehouse, it ran right through the middle of the ordinary labour market, the salaried workers who work more than their contract states. The businesses I investigated rarely thought the numbers applied to them, the numbers usually disagreed.

Your records are the essential

If I could tattoo one sentence onto every business owner, it would be this, when the FWA comes, your records are your defence, or your conviction. HMRC’s Minimum Wage Unit have been using the ’show and tell’ model for a while, tell me how you manage compliance and then show me!

Inspectors can walk into your premises, demand documents, examine payroll and holiday records, and require people to sit down and answer questions. They can ask for records in clear, legible form, including electronic ones (the digital footprint is strong evidence), stretching back across the previous six years. Where they find underpayment, they can issue a notice demanding the arrears plus a civil penalty of 200% of what was owed, capped at £20,000 per worker. Over time, that reach is set to extend beyond Minimum Wage into holiday pay and statutory sick pay.

Notably, the law doesn’t tell you how to keep records. You’re expected to keep them in whatever manner you reasonably think fit. That sounds generous until you realise what it really means, the test isn’t your filing system, it’s whether you can produce something clear, accurate and retrievable when someone asks. In my investigating days, the businesses that struggled weren’t always the worst payers. They were the ones who couldn’t find anything, and disorganisation, read from the other side of the table, can look an awful lot like having something to hide.

The part that should genuinely make you think

Now the bit that keeps me up at night on behalf of clients, and that I think deserves far more attention than it’s getting.

The legislation hands the Secretary of State the power to bring an employment tribunal claim on a worker’s behalf, where the view is taken that the worker has a claim but won’t pursue it themselves. No grievance. No ACAS early conciliation. No request from the employee. The worker doesn’t have to be consulted and, this is the striking part, has no right to veto it, even if they object to their own name being used. The claim runs in the worker’s name and any award goes to them, but the FWA decides whether to litigate and how. And the Secretary of State "is not liable to any worker for anything done (or not done)" in wielding that power.

Let that sink in for a minute. On one hand, the Working Lives evidence is partly a story about access to justice, about vulnerable workers who can’t or won’t enforce rights they plainly have. It’s worth remembering this is the same research that found one in seven precarious workers underpaid against the minimum wage, and a third without a proper contract, people, in other words, who are among the least likely to ever bring a claim of their own. A state willing to step in for them answers a real and stubborn problem. On the other hand, we’ve just created a route to litigation that bypasses the worker’s own choice entirely. What’s not in doubt is the consequence for employers, you can no longer reassure yourself that a happy, loyal workforce means no claims, the warning signs you used to rely on may simply not appear.

So what advice would I give an employer?

The same things I’d have hoped to find when I was the one knocking on the door:

• Get your pay compliance looked at properly by someone who fully understands where the pitfalls can hide, deductions, salary sacrifice and working-time calculations are where the quiet breaches live.
• Make sure holiday entitlement and pay are calculated correctly and clearly evidenced.
• Confirm your pay, hours and leave records are held securely for at least six years and can be pulled fast.
• Make sure HR, payroll and your managers actually understand what an FWA inspector can do and how to respond.
• Have a plan for an inspection before you need one, who leads, who escalates, who speaks. And if you find a problem, fix it early, engagement and self-correction genuinely move the dial on outcomes, where stalling does the opposite.

None of this is dramatic, that’s rather the point. The Fair Work Agency isn’t coming for the obvious villains so much as for the businesses that assumed "we’d never deliberately do that" was the same as "we’re compliant." Having stood in both places, I can tell you they were never the same thing, and the gap between them just became a lot more expensive.

Join us and Jeni at The Reward and Payroll Summit this September, where Jeni will be discussing payroll and employment law legislation -Click here to find out more