Real cases. Real consequences.

US authorities described the operation as targeting unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes, and it has been called the largest single-site enforcement operation in the Department of Homeland Security's history. Images of workers shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles caused significant concern in South Korea.

The claims challenge the lawfulness of the detention. A year after the raid, the matter is still unresolved.

The same checks found 617 driving and resting time infringements, 189 technical deficiencies and 10 criminal offences related to driving times, rest periods or driver cards. EUR 136,713 in financial securities was collected.

23 labour inspectors and enforcement experts from seven countries took part: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. Compliance with posting rules was checked alongside driving time and tachograph rules.

The cases reported in July show what counts as work: an Indian national and a Singaporean were deported for teaching yoga at a villa, and a Chinese national for installing factory machinery and training staff. All three held visitor permits that do not allow employment.

Under the Indonesian immigration law a re-entry ban runs for up to ten years and can be extended once by the same term. For an employer, a workation in the wrong permit class is not a private matter: it is the company whose work the employee was doing.

The choice-of-law clause alone does not establish that connection. What counted were the facts of how the contract was performed: salary paid in Swiss francs into a Swiss bank account, affiliation to Swiss social insurance, Swiss tax treatment and Swiss business tools.

The ruling cuts both ways for cross-border remote work. Where social security, tax and payroll genuinely sit in one country, that country's law can hold. Where they do not, a clause in the contract will not rescue it. The French Cour de cassation, which referred the questions, now has to apply the ruling.

The register is not confined to small subcontractors. 90 well-known company groups account for 185 entries between them, spread across industry and machinery, IT and telecoms, consulting and audit, construction, pharma, staffing, logistics and energy. Several appear repeatedly: Capgemini ten times, Hitachi Energy eight, ABB seven, Oliver Wyman and Canon six each, Assa Abloy and Siemens five. Also on the list are KPMG, Deloitte, Liebherr, Alstom, Nokia, Ericsson, Infosys, Cognizant, Carl Zeiss, Trumpf, Voith, Knorr-Bremse, Bureau Veritas, Intertek, TÜV SÜD, TÜV NORD, Adecco, Randstad, Deutsche Post and Lufthansa Technik.

84 per cent of those 185 entries are breaches of the notification duty under Art. 6 EntsG, sanctioned under Art. 9(2)(a). Not underpayment, and not a failed audit. These are companies with an HR department, a legal team, a travel policy and compliance training, and what catches them is the filing. Across the register as a whole the share is 55 per cent.

A notification breach is cheap on its own. SECO’s published tariff starts at a warning and runs from CHF 250 to a ceiling of CHF 5,000 for repeat cases. What escalates is not paying it: an unpaid sanction is sanctioned under Art. 9(2)(e) with a service ban and nothing else, scaled to the amount left outstanding. Up to 12 months below CHF 2,000, up to 24 months from CHF 2,001, and up to 48 months from CHF 20,001. The statutory maximum is five years.

The register records whether a fine was imposed, not how much, so no monetary total can be read out of it.

The court held that the secondees remained employed by the foreign entity, which stayed the real and economic employer: they kept their social security entitlements and their lien on the foreign job, and only the foreign employer could terminate or discipline them.

The judgment turns on that characterisation rather than on permanent establishment, but the exposure has the same shape. The Indian entity may have to withhold tax at source on the reimbursement, and advisers have flagged the taxable-presence risk that follows. Several technology firms and global capability centres paused secondments planned for FY27 while they reassess the structure.

Eight drivers were found to be working illegally, five of them employed by the same company. Drivers from Uzbekistan, India and Angola held no work permit, and one was working under an unreported posting arrangement. Inspectors also suspected breaches of the Dutch minimum wage and holiday allowance act.

The Dutch branch office was found empty. The Dutch road transport organisation NIWO started proceedings to revoke every transport licence held by the Dutch establishment.

The authority says the breaches can lead to fines of around EUR 30,000. Under the WagwEU, posted workers are entitled to the core Dutch terms of employment, including the minimum wage.

Companies were also found registering workers and paying social security contributions in one member state while operating in another, a recognised form of social security fraud.

In the most severe cases, work was stopped on the spot.

Thirty-five people are under investigation and six arrest warrants were executed; a further fifteen were detained over residence offences. The companies involved had performed around EUR 70 million of construction work since 2022, with roughly EUR 35 million in sham invoices used to fund cash wages.

The damage established so far is around EUR 28 million. The accusations are withholding and misappropriating social security contributions, fraud against the construction industry welfare fund SOKA-BAU, and wage tax evasion.

Officers checked whether employers had registered their employees for social insurance, whether workers held the required work and residence permits, and whether the minimum wage was being paid, through interviews on site and inspection of business records.

The scale is not exceptional. In construction and allied trades in 2025 the customs undeclared-work unit opened over 10,000 criminal proceedings and around 7,900 administrative proceedings, and roughly 60% of the financial damage it established that year came from the construction sector.

The ground is Art. 9(2)(e) EntsG, non-payment of a legally effective sanction. No fine, control costs or procedure costs were imposed alongside it, because at that stage the ban is the entire sanction.

Under the tariff SECO publishes, the length of such a ban tracks the amount left unpaid, and 24 months corresponds to a sum between CHF 2,001 and CHF 10,000. A four-figure unpaid sanction has cost the company two years of access to the Swiss market.

The entry appears on the list SECO publishes monthly, which covers service bans only. Sanctions that stopped at a fine are recorded in the full register, available on request.

In November 2023 Zurich sanctioned the Lodi entity for a breach of the notification duty under Art. 9(2)(a) EntsG, imposing a fine and procedure costs. The sanction went unpaid, and in September 2024 Zurich followed it with a 12-month service ban under Art. 9(2)(e), the ground reserved for non-payment, running to 25 September 2025.

The pattern then repeated at the Monselice entity. Fribourg had fined it in November 2023 for a minimum wage breach under Art. 9(2)(b). That sanction also went unpaid, and in January 2026 Schwyz imposed a 24-month ban under case SZ 2026/13/TPK_PK, running from 21 January 2026 to 20 January 2028.

A ban is not a fine. For its duration the company may not provide services in Switzerland at all. Hitachi group entities appear in the register 12 times between 2021 and 2026, across Czechia, Germany, Italy, Poland and Slovakia.

The court imposed fines totalling EUR 740,000 across the parent company and its subcontractors, with additional social security arrears of at least EUR 600,000 owed to the French social security agency.

Senior managers received personal fines, a suspended prison sentence and lifetime or multi-year bans on operating a business.

The company was also found to have been established for the sole purpose of supplying labour to the Belgian construction sector, carrying out no substantial activity in Portugal.

The case was subsequently referred to the European Court of Justice, which issued a ruling in January 2025 clarifying that host country authorities must follow a formal dialogue and conciliation procedure before they can challenge or disregard A1 certificates, even where fraud is suspected.

When the CEO next travelled to the US he was arrested on arrival at a New York airport and held for five days before being released on a five-figure bail. He was detained in the country for a further 14 days and received a substantial financial penalty on top of the bail costs.

The CEO was held personally liable for the violation. The company was fined EUR 50,000 and narrowly avoided an entry in the German commercial misconduct register, a listing that can bar a company from public tenders and create significant downstream licensing and regulatory complications.

The assessment was eventually overturned and Netflix got the money back. That is a less reassuring ending than it looks: the company still had to fight a multi-year legal battle, navigate cross-border tax authority scrutiny and produce extensive documentation under pressure.

With travel compliance tracking in place from the start, there would have been no permanent establishment hook for authorities to grab, and no case to fight.

Inspectors interviewed more than 60 workers from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Peru and India. They identified non-genuine posting situations, the possible use of fraudulent PD A1 forms, and breaches of both working conditions and social security rules.

The findings were passed between the authorities through the IMI system for further investigation. The lesson for an employer is the reach rather than the outcome: a posting is checked in the host country, but the paperwork behind it is verified with the home country.

The case did not end there: in the years that followed, the company reached separate settlements with individual US states on the same or related conduct, paying EUR 900,000 to New York and EUR 750,000 to California.

The incident illustrates the enforcement risk that exists even for short-term remote work in countries where tourist-entry conditions explicitly prohibit work activity.

The case remains ongoing, with potential combined tax liabilities reaching USD 530 million across the affected jurisdictions.

To avoid prolonged litigation and the risk of jail time for employees, the company settled with the Italian authorities for EUR 320 million.

A subsequent attempt to offset the Italian tax payment against its home-country tax liability failed, leaving the company bearing a significant double taxation burden on top of the settlement.

The workers held A1 certificates issued in Bulgaria, but Belgian courts determined these had been obtained fraudulently. The Antwerp Court of Appeal ruled it was not bound by the certificates, a position upheld by the Belgian Supreme Court in June 2018 following a referral to the European Court of Justice.

The case established that EU social security rules cannot be used to fraudulently avoid the social security obligations of the country where the work is actually performed.