South Africa: Employers can ensure compliance with POPIA quickly and easily

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) has far-reaching implications for employers that collect, hold, transfer and use employees’ personal information, and many are unsure about how to meet the fast-approaching deadline for compliance. Senior associate, Chloë Loubser from our Employment and Benefits Practice was interviewed on Fine Music Radio’s Talking Point on POPIA. Click here to listen to the podcast.  To help our clients overcome this challenge we have developed a POPIA Toolkit for Employers that provides the documentation employers would need to ensure minimum compliance with POPIA by 30 June 2021. If further guidance is published by the Information Regulator between 1 January and 31 December 2021, the contents of the Toolkit for Employers will be updated. Using the Toolkit for Employers should enable employers to: appoint and register an Information Officer and Deputy Information Officer/s with the Information Regulator; comply with the duties imposed on the Information Officer, which include preparing a processing notification to employees and a compliance framework; update their manuals in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act; enter into POPIA-compliant agreements with operators, such as payroll providers, that process personal information on their behalf; and understand the provisions of POPIA, with a particular focus on the conditions for the lawful processing of information and the rights of employees. The consequences of non-compliance are significant and include hefty administrative fines of up to ZAR 10 million. This would be in addition to any reputational damage and costs an organisation may suffer as a result of failing to comply. Our POPIA Toolkit for Employers should provide much-needed peace of mind that employers are doing the right things – and doing them timeously. The POPIA Toolkit for Employers will be available from 3 December, for a total once-off fee of ZAR 20 000 plus VAT. It can be ordered by sending an email to POPIAtoolkit@bowmanslaw.com. In addition, if you would like to conduct document reviews to assess your internal compliance, we have fully trained our artificial intelligence tool, Kira, to assist with these types of instructions.