May 2023 Updates & notification of a major change to our data retention policy

New Thank You Templates

We have added a new Email and SMS template for the Thank You message that gets sent to staff upon completion of the self-onboarding process. This allows you to change sender name, change the message, add the Location/Venue name etc.

You can find the new templates (now 4 in total) under the respective MyAccount / Email Defaults and SMS Defaults tabs.

New SMS Thank You

Previously we only emailed thank you messages, now if the person completes the onboard from an SMS link, they will get an SMS thank you message per the new template.

Enhanced Password Strength

As part of our continuous improvement of our cyber-security measures, we will be enforcing a new, higher standard for password strength for vSure users.

All NEW users or password changes from 1 June 2023 will need to comply with the following password standard:

• Minimum of 12 characters long
• Contain at least 1 uppercase or lowercase character; and
• at least 1 number; and
• at least 1 special character (e.g. !,@,# etc)

Existing users will be given a grace period, whereby the existing password will continue to work, even if it does not meet the new standard, for 3 months. BUT we do recommend all users change their passwords over the coming weeks up to the new standard.

To change your password, log into vSure and go to the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines in the top right of your screen) and select, Change Password. You can do this at any point, including today!

Purging of P.I.I. Documents

Again, as part of our continuous improvement to mitigate growing cyber-security risks, we are going to make a major change to our data retention policy in the weeks ahead. Please consider this advanced notice of the impending change.

As you know, the vSure web-app can collect images/pdfs of documents that are considered "Personal identifiable information" (PII), such as passports, birth certificates etc. To this point, our data retention policy has been 7 years, to comply with employment audit regulations.

But, being proactive about cyber-risk, sensing the mood of society and the likely future direction of government policy, we have made the decision to move to a 90-day document retention policy for PII documents/images.

The fact is, employers need to collect evidence of Right To Work and PII documents are the only way to do this. We have consulted with Australia's leading migration law experts and are convinced that we can meet the 7-year employment audit rules through clear logs/audit trails WITHOUT retaining the actual images/copies of the PII documents.

Our plan will be to still collect these PII documents from your staff, provide the workflow for sighting the documents, keep them available to the employer for 90 days thereafter, before purging them and retaining a clear audit trail that the right to work documentation was indeed checked.

NOTE: if your company policy is to retain these documents, you will still be able to download them from vSure (the review screen or Documents tab) at any point, up until 90 days after collection. We do not recommend this, for the same reason we are moving away from retaining the documents, but each company will be free to make their own decision on storing the PII documents.

vSure will still provide the clear audit trail for work rights compliance, in the event you are subject to a Border Force / Fairwork audit, despite the fact we will be purging the actual images/documents.