Guidance
Understand your legal responsibilities when engaging volunteers
Volunteers and the law
Understand your legal responsibilities: A guide to volunteer laws in New Zealand.
Community Law Aotearoa has produced an excellent online resource with great guidance for volunteering. It answers most of the important legal questions.
Health and Safety for volunteers
Everybody at work has responsibilities under The Health and Safety Work Act. All organisations must ensure the health and safety of their workers (including volunteer workers). They must also ensure that other people (which includes volunteers that are not ‘volunteer workers’) are not put at risk by their work.
Three key guidance areas:
Keeping volunteers healthy and safe
Volunteers: Key things to know
Information for officers who are volunteers
Free online learning modules
Volunteers versus employees
For somebody to be a volunteer they must not expect payment and they must not receive payment. It is often obvious when someone is a volunteer, for example, volunteering once weekly for a charity or community with no expectation of payment. The situation can be much more complicated when it comes to work experience, work trials and unpaid internships or when a volunteer is working in a commercial organisation.
Volunteer rights under the Human Rights Act
The Human Rights Act protects people from unlawful discrimination. The Act’s intention is to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in key areas of life, including employment, and this includes the recruitment of volunteers. The Human Rights Act uses a definition of ‘employment’ that includes volunteers.
Volunteer expenses
Expenses repaid to volunteers working for your organisation are not taxed. Payments to volunteers for their services should be taxed as PAYE or as a schedular payment. IRD outlines how to navigate payments made to volunteers from a tax perpsective.
Vetting volunteers and background checks
Vetting volunteers: why it's important and tips for doing it.
Background checks to help vet volunteers
When you are vetting volunteers, there are many different background checks that you can do. There is no single, full-proof form of vetting that will give you a complete picture of a person — not even a police check. Carrying out a range of vetting procedures may help you to build a consistent picture of the applicant and to check any claims they make.
Identify possible risks to your clients to determine what checks are needed. For example, if your organisation works with children, you may want to check volunteers’ backgrounds for any offences relating to sexual offences or child abuse. The person making the checks should know about child protection requirements.
Types of background checks
These checks listed here are designed to look for different information (e.g. criminal convictions or opinions of others about the applicant) and require a different amount of time and resources to carry out.
- Request a police vetting check. Police vetting is a common way to check information held about a person on the police’s database, such as criminal convictions or a family violence report. The applicant must provide written consent for an organisation to request a police vetting check. The Police may also provide information relating to any violent or sexual behaviours of the person being vetted, which may not have resulted in a conviction, as well as information about any interactions with the Police. Note that a police vetting check is not a complete background check so you may need to use other vetting procedures. You should also be aware that under Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act 2004, a person may be allowed to conceal their criminal record if they meet certain criteria. Find out more about Police vetting applications online.
- Obtain a criminal record. A police vetting check is not a criminal check, so you may also want to request a criminal record. As a third party, you can seek the applicant’s permission to view their criminal record.
- Check the applicant’s references. You may ask the applicant to provide contact details for referees. Referees should not be family members or partners of the applicant and should have known the applicant for a minimum period (e.g. two years). Have a process for carrying out reference checks and a list of relevant questions.
- Check information publicly available about the applicant online. You may wish to do an Internet search on the applicant to see what information about the applicant is available online.
- Undertake an interview. It may be useful to carry out an additional interview to develop an even deeper understanding of the applicant.
Designing a vetting procedure
Design a vetting procedure that is appropriate for your organisation and your clients, and the type of work carried out by your volunteers. You may not need to do all of the vetting procedures above. The more vulnerable your clients are, the more thorough your background check needs to be.
Ensure your organisation has a systematic way of dealing with background checks of applicants. In this way, you will protect your service users and your staff, as well as the reputation of your organisation and brand.