A quick tax update by PwC where the main focus was residency disputes resulting from individual tax audits were substantially on the increase; followed by an Immigration update by Fragomen on regional visas being processed more favourably;

we launched into our topic in a road table format with Ryanne Klein and Alana Haiduk of PwC facilitating.

Recalling the introduction to this session:

All Roles Flex, travelling executives, people that occupy multiple roles or work across regions... international business travel takes many forms and continues to grow.

Whilst 75% of Australian organisations have international business travellers, only 8% of organisations have a policy to deal with them*. And very few have a designated person/team responsible for them. More and more we are seeing this new population of mobile employees become part of the global mobility team's responsibility. It's the future of mobility and perhaps our role.

But it's tricky and tax authorities are starting to focus on it.

During this interactive session we looked at:

- strategies for identifying who the business travellers are, why they are travelling and what risks they are creating,

- discussed engaging other stakeholders, especially the C-suite – the risks are high and so the business must care – penalties for individuals, the organisation and directors

- how to access your own data from travel providers, internal systems (data related to IP addresses in use for example), working with IT

- and we began formulating an action plan.

We also looked at quick wins, cost savings that could be achieved from travel providers being consolidated and also then being able to collect data from few sources. Scrutinizing travel providers and querying how they are going to support the organisation.

Business Travellers are a growing area of concern from a risk perspective and global mobility teams have a better understanding than most within an organisation but they are often under resourced to take on this challenge and need to work with finance and risk teams and the C suite to find solutions for this growing issue.