Welcome to the FAQ answering questions that our members and prospective members might have about how to use the results to help improve the compliance of their UK Section 54 modern slavery statements.
Is this an official audit by the Home Office?
No. We are not a part of the Home Office. We were referred to in the Home Office letter in 2017 to over 17k CEOs asking them to comply with Section 54 but we are a completely independent social enterprise. We reported and represented our members via the Home Office Transparency in Supply Chains Modern Slavery Strategy and Implementation Group in order to help inform policy and strategy going forward. We continue to represent members and present findings from our ongoing compliance work on the Home Office Prevention Forum. Our Transparency in Supply Chains platform TISCreport brings together open data, closed data and shared data on non-financial due diligence and supply chain risks. Our data is used in procurement decisions by over 350 local government bodies and several hundred thousand companies.
As such, our automated audit results does not influence the Home Office audit one way or the other. However, we have communicated frequently with Home Office Modern Slavery Unit, clarifying many of the criteria that have been causing confusion amongst companies, and have implemented our algorithm accordingly. This increases the likelihood of your compliance statement satisfying the expected criteria.
Why does the audit says our statement fails compliance checks when we think it's wrong?
Our system is a newly developed automated audit using AI technology which, with our testing, shows a 98% accuracy level. There are a number reasons why a false negative could arise in our audit. They are:
1) The wrong statement has been uploaded (or the latest statement has not been found by our TISCbots)
2) The statement was not machine-readable
3) If your website address was not in our records or recently changed
4) If your web servers are blocking our TISCbots
5) A third party site, e.g. Companies House, has not been able to respond to our request for verification data in relation to your compliance statement.
6) Your website coding fails accessibility standards (which in turn is a potential Equality Act 2010 violation in relation to Section 20 and Section 29 if disabled users wish to assess a service provider on their statement).
If you are a contributing member of TISCreport and think that one of these technical issues is responsible for not being able to access audit results please get in touch via our online support desk so we can investigate further.
If you have checked against all of the advice within the automated audit details provided and are happy that you satisfy all of the criteria then do please log where you disagree with the AI via our online support desk and we will use it to improve its accuracy further.
How do I access my Audit results for my MSA Statement?
If you are a fully contributing member and meet the threshold for Section 54 compliance, simply log into your account and go to your TISCreport profile page for your company. You will be able to can access your audit results on the right hand side of your statement.
If you are a free or affiliate member, simply upgrade your membership to a fully paid subscription for all companies on your workspace.
Why can't I see audit results for my statement?
If your latest accounts show you to be above the £36M threshold and in scope, then this should appear. If it doesn't please raise a ticket with the online support desk detailing your company, and a link to your accounts on Companies House specifying your turnover so we can work out why our systems have been unable to confirm your compliance status.
Who else has access to the audit results for our MSA statements?
The audit results are not publicly available. Only you and your buyers, if they've subscribed to our supplier dash audit service, will have access to your audit results. If you are a fully subscribed member you can see which buyers are tracking your transparency on your workspace by clicking "Manage" next to your company, and selecting "Organisation Dashboards". If there are organisations tracking you openly you will see them by clicking "View who is Watching".
Can I access audits of my suppliers on TISCreport too?
Absolutely! If you're a member, you can subscribe to the AI audit data set for your suppliers using your dashboard. It's an annual subscription and will let you know when suppliers have uploaded their latest statements, and when the audit results are available. Obviously you will need to upload your suppliers to your dashboard first. Get in touch if you would like support in setting all this up.
Can I access audit results for companies on a commercial subscription?
Yes, we do also provide commercial data subscriptions alongside our community data subscriptions. Get in touch and let us know what you would like so we can tell you what your subscription price will be. Every penny will be used to help us achieve our mission of corporate transparency and social justice!
Does this AI audit replace a legal audit by lawyers?
No. It is designed to complement the legal advice you get from your legal team. Our AI audit is a technical check of compliance criteria. If you have a legal firm acting for you, then the audit results are best used in conjunction with advice they provide. A growing number of law firms are tracking statement compliance of their clients on TISCreport. If so, you may be hearing from them about alerts they have received through their own client-tracker dashboards on TISCreport.
Our servers are blocking your bots so we can't see our audit results. What do we do?
Don't panic! Drop us a line at our online support desk and we will work with you to get this resolved with your IT team.
I've uploaded my latest statement. How long will I need to wait before seeing the automated results?
We're working on speeding this up but in the mean time allow seven days. We have to balance speed for users using their accounts with processing resource for the audit. We're seeking a sponsoring cloud partner so we can reduce automated analysis time down to minutes not days.
I've subscribed to the MSA Statement Compliance Rating data set for assessing my suppliers. What do the star ratings mean?
If you've subscribed to the MSA Statement Compliance Rating data set then the star ratings next to your supplier names in the organisation list enable you to see at a glance which suppliers have met some or all of the compliance criteria for their latest statement, based on our AI technology. Our AI audit assesses companies and their statements for key compliance criteria as specified by the Home Office. Five stars means that we've been able to confirm compliance with all minimum criteria currently measured by our system. The lower the rating, the more criteria were either failed or the AI was unable to confirm compliance based on the text analysed. It does not tell you which criteria they failed for, but will give you an assessment of statement quality.
Critically if you see suppliers who have statements that have failed on all criteria (zero stars) you will want to check their statement actually is a statement (some upload the wrong document). Be sure to invite them to update TISCreport so that all of their buyers can access the correct statement, reducing the load for others in their due diligence tasks!
Why have you produced an AI system to assess compliance?
Our members told us that there is an increased burden on their businesses in relation to their compliance obligations. Much time is wasted on the tickbox aspect of compliance and due diligence, and it was our aim to help members spend their time where it can most effectively achieve good human rights and environmental outcomes instead. The TISCreport AI has been developed thanks to the membership subscriptions we receive from companies using our platform and services, and will extend to other regulations in coming months.
A supplier has a statement in tiscreport but the audit results are not available for them. Why is this?
If you have subscribed to the AI audit data set for your supplier dashboard, and the audit is not appearing then there are a few possible reasons.
1) The company is not in scope for Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act, i.e. their turnover is below the threshold.
2) The statement is unreadable by our system due to an undetermined file error.
3) The statement has recently been updated and is awaiting a re-audit.
TISCreport members can request that their own statement be audited by the system for their own private use even if they are out of scope.
If there is a requirement by your procurement procedure for a statement quality rating regardless of turnover, please let us know. If there is enough demand we can implement an additional subscription for this analysis.
