€1 million in savings: How Telenor mitigates business travel compliance risk with WorkFlex

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🔎 ABOUT TELENOR

Leading telecom company willing to modernize management of tax risk

Telenor is a telecom and digital services company from Norway with more 170 years of history and 11,000 employees globally. The company conducts business in 25 countries, mainly in the Nordic region and Asia. With its significant international presence, the company generates substantial cross-border employee movement. In the last year alone, Telenor has records of 13'500 trips, of which 5'500 were international business trips.

With the great volume of business trips, Telenor's team saw improvement opportunities in business travel compliance management:

The key item on my agenda since I joined Telenor four years ago has been to modernise how we manage tax risk across the group and mobility in general, and business travel in particular.

Liv Lundqvist, SVP and Head of Group Tax at Telenor

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🔥 CHALLENGE

Unmanaged business travel created serious permanent establishment and tax compliance risks

Telenor faced several critical challenges in managing its international business travel:

• Taxable presence risks: The way Telenor conducted travel activities represented the risk of establishing taxable presence or even permanent establishment in countries abroad. "It became very clear to me that left unmanaged, our employees could then lose the protection provided by the 183 days rule in the tax treaties," revealed Liv Lundqvist.
• Manual case-by-case processing: Business travel compliance wasn't managed centrally or in a structured manner at Telenor. While expat assignments had clear governance, short-term business trips and non-standard cross-border mobility were handled differently across legal entities, all done manually on a case-by-case basis, often with help of several external vendors.
• Inconsistent documentation practices: There was no central approach to applying for A1 certificates or Posted Workers Directive documentation. HR colleagues in some of the entities applied for A1 certificates when business trips exceeded certain days, but there was no one structured approach.
• Duty of care concerns: The company wanted to ensure employees traveling for Telenor always had proper documentation in hand, reflecting their strong duty of care philosophy rooted in their Scandinavian headquarters culture. As explained by Annemarie Bunschoten-Schraven, Global Mobility Project Manager at Telenor: "We don't want them to be caught in a certain country without the right visa, or without the right Social Security documentation."  

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🎉 SOLUTION

Partnering with WorkFlex to automate and centralize compliance management

After a thorough RFQ process, Telenor team selected WorkFlex. Their choice was influenced by several key capabilities:

• Comprehensive risk assessment: WorkFlex's global compliance engine evaluates all core business travel-related risks including tax, labor law, visa, Posted Workers Directive requirements, and more, providing clear guidance on compliance needs.
• Seamless system integration: WorkFlex integrated seamlessly with Telenor's existing travel booking system Egencia and HRIS Oracle. That ensured comprehensive compliance coverage without disrupting established workflows.
• Automated documentation generation: WorkFlex platform automatically handles A1 certificates, Certificate of Coverage, and Posted Workers notifications, removing the manual case-by-case approach that previously required external vendor involvement.
• Adaptive implementation support: WorkFlex's speed and flexibility proved essential for enterprise-scale adaption. The WorkFlex team stood out with rapid adaptation capabilities and short communication lines enabling quick resolution of any challenges.

"During the RFQ process, it became very clear to me that we needed to partner with a modern vendor who could support us through this transformation journey. You share our interest in ensuring that it is the system that will handle certain tasks and hopefully remove some manual work, either by us or by our external advisors."

- Liv Lundqvist, Senior Vice President and Head of Group Tax

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🎯 BENEFITS

€1 million in business travel compliance risk mitigation

Telenor has so far achieved substantial benefits through WorkFlex implementation:

• Major risk mitigation: Looking at the volumes of business travel and potential fines, the solution easily leads to approximately €1 million in savings by mitigating compliance risks.
• Rapid 3-month implementation: Telenor had completed all legal data privacy requirements, technical integration, and employee communication within just three months, demonstrating the efficiency of WorkFlex's implementation process.
• Enhanced operational efficiency: Instead of case-by-case involvement of tax vendors for basic assessments, Telenor now knows all business trips managed by WorkFlex have proper risk assessments, A1 and PWD compliance in place, allowing their specialised tax vendors to focus on other tasks like shadow payroll.
• Elevated global mobility function: The centralized business travel compliance has increased the visibility of Telenor's global mobility team as an expertise center, helping them renew all cross-border mobility offerings and better support talent development initiatives.

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One of the success factors that we were actually able to go live was the fact that WorkFlex is super-flexible and adaptable. The fact that the mindset of the people working at WorkFlex and their technical knowledge and really having this tech first approach helped... There was never a "No" as an answer.

– Annemarie Bunschoten-Schraven, Global Mobility Project Manager