Fair Work Information Statement and GPS time tracking onboarding

Your operations team has just been audited by Fair Work, and the inspector’s opening question was simple enough: produce the signed Fair Work Information Statement and Casual Employment Information Statement acknowledgements for every new hire and every casual-to-permanent conversion over the last three years. Your HR file has the signed statement for the new permanent hires. It does not have the casual-conversion acknowledgements at all. And the Information Statement at hire is missing for about a third of the casuals who came across from contractor arrangements. A simple question, and the file cannot answer it.

This is how a small statutory obligation turns into a large number. Nobody decided to skip the statement. It just never had a moment in the process where it had to happen, and so, for a third of the people, it did not.

A small section with large consequences

Section 125 of the Fair Work Act 2009 requires every employer to give a Fair Work Information Statement to a new employee before they start, or as soon as practicable after. The 2024 reforms widened this: the Casual Employment Information Statement must now go to a casual at the start of employment, again at six months and at twelve, and again when a casual converts to permanent or is offered conversion. It is no longer one document at one moment, it is a small sequence of moments, and a sequence is exactly the kind of thing a paper process loses track of.

The penalty for failing to provide the statement is a civil penalty under the Act, and it is assessed per worker, per omission. An employer who has missed the statement for fifty new hires across three years is not facing one breach, it is facing fifty, and the maximum exposure on that single line of record-keeping climbs toward seven figures before any other contravention is even examined. Worse, the breach is a doorway: accessory liability under the Act can reach the directors, the HR managers and the accountants who were involved in it or aware of it, and the Ombudsman has made that a routine enforcement tool. A missing statement is small. What stands behind it is not.

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Why paper stopped working for this

The traditional workflow is paper: the statement is signed at induction and filed in HR. It fails in 2026 for three plain reasons. Remote and field-based hires never reach a central HR office to do the paper signature in the first place. The casual-conversion statements are missed because nobody is standing at the six-month and twelve-month marks to trigger them. And the seven-year retention requirement leaves a paper file that nobody can actually search on the day the audit lands. The process did not fail through carelessness, it failed because it asked people to remember a calendar.

A workforce platform turns this into a flow instead of a memory test. The new hire is enrolled, the statement is presented on first login, the worker acknowledges it electronically, and the acknowledgement, with its timestamp and device evidence, settles into an immutable audit log. The platform then watches the tenure clock on its own: six months, twelve months, the conversion offer, the conversion itself. Each milestone presents the right statement and captures the acknowledgement, and nobody has to keep a date in their head.

Casual conversion, where the new rules bite

The 2024 casual-conversion reforms reshaped the employer’s obligations. After twelve months of regular and systematic engagement the employer must offer conversion to permanent, the worker can also request it, and a refusal is permitted only on reasonable grounds that have to be documented. The Casual Employment Information Statement runs alongside all of this, at start, at six months, at twelve, and again at the conversion or the offer.

The fix is to set the tenure clock at the worker level, present the statement automatically at each milestone, capture the acknowledgement, and surface the conversion-offer trigger to HR as a task that cannot quietly disappear. Each missed milestone is its own separate breach, so a platform that catches every one of them before it lapses removes a genuine and recurring slice of enforcement risk, the kind that accumulates silently between audits.

What the audit looks like from the other side

When Fair Work asks for the statement evidence, the platform-equipped employer produces a single export: every worker, every statement issued, every acknowledgement, every milestone, with timestamps attached. The inspector reviews the sample, finds no gaps, and that line of enquiry closes in a meeting rather than escalating into a referral. The employer who relies on paper produces a binder, the inspector finds the gaps, the gaps become breaches, and the breaches become penalties.

The marginal cost of running the platform is a small fraction of a single one of those breaches. GeoTapp’s onboarding flow ships with the Fair Work Information Statement, the Casual Employment Information Statement and the milestone triggers already configured for Australian employment, so the audit conversation starts from defensible rather than defensive. Start a free fourteen-day trial, with no card, and let the milestones look after themselves.

How do you currently track the six and twelve-month casual statements, on a spreadsheet, in someone’s calendar, or not at all? Tell us in the comments below. It is the obligation most likely to slip between the cracks of a busy onboarding, and what you write helps other employers close the cracks before an inspector finds them.