Matching A Foreign Worker's Pay To The Offer That Brought Her Here

The situation

Karim and Samir had built a mid-sized construction company in Sudbury over about fifteen years, with contracts stretching into the surrounding mining region where projects often run for months at a time in locations far from the nearest hospital. Site medical coverage had become a real gap. After a near-miss injury on a remote access-road project the year before, the company decided it needed its own occupational medicine specialist on staff rather than relying on ad hoc coverage, and went looking for a physician with the right background.

They found one abroad: Analyn, a specialist physician with several years of experience in occupational and remote-site medicine, working in the Philippines. Hiring her meant sponsoring a foreign worker, which meant a positive labour market impact assessment — a federal process confirming that hiring a foreign worker for the role would not negatively affect the Canadian job market — followed by her own application for a work permit. The company's HR administrator had handled the labour market impact assessment application directly, describing the role, the wage, and the hours in the supporting job offer. It was approved. Analyn's work permit came through several months later, and she relocated to Sudbury to start the job.

Karim and Samir came to Treadstone Law about six weeks after she started, not because anything had gone wrong yet, but because a colleague in the construction industry had mentioned that his company had been selected for a compliance inspection after sponsoring a foreign worker, and it had been an unpleasant surprise. They wanted their own file looked at before anyone came asking.

What the review found

Hiring a foreign worker under a positive labour market impact assessment comes with an ongoing obligation, not a one-time approval. Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, employers who sponsor foreign workers are subject to compliance review — sometimes random, sometimes triggered by a complaint or a routine audit — for a period after the worker starts. The review checks one core thing: does what is actually happening on the job match what the employer promised in the offer that got the work permit approved? Same wage, same hours, same duties, same occupation. Employers are expected to keep records — pay stubs, time records, a copy of the job offer and the original application — ready to produce if asked.

Analyn's original job offer, prepared by the company's HR administrator, promised an annual salary of roughly $185,000 for a defined set of clinical and occupational health duties, paid as a guaranteed salary rather than an hourly or per-visit rate. In practice, once she started, the company's payroll system processed her compensation differently: a lower guaranteed base of roughly $150,000, topped up with on-call stipends and mileage-linked payments for site visits that, in a typical month, brought her total pay close to the original figure but not through the structure the offer described. Nobody had done this to shortchange her — the payroll administrator had simply applied the company's standard field-staff pay structure without checking it against the specific terms of Analyn's labour market impact assessment file. But a compliance review does not grade on whether the total worked out close enough. It compares the offer on file to the pay stubs, and a guaranteed salary that becomes a variable stipend arrangement is a mismatch, even if the dollar amounts land in a similar range most months.

There was a second, smaller issue. The job offer described Analyn's duties using an occupational classification tied to hospital and clinic-based specialist practice. Her actual work — a mix of clinic hours and travel to remote sites — was consistent with that classification in substance, but the offer's wording didn't reflect the travel component at all, which could read, to a reviewer working strictly from the paper file, as a role that had shifted from what was approved.

What we did

1. Pulled the full compliance file together first. We requested the original labour market impact assessment application, the job offer, Analyn's employment contract, and three months of payroll records, and set them side by side. This is the same comparison an inspector would make, and doing it first meant we found the gaps before anyone with authority to penalize the company did.
2. Corrected the pay structure going forward. We advised the company to restructure Analyn's compensation to match the guaranteed salary the offer described — roughly $185,000 paid as base salary, with on-call and travel time built into that figure rather than paid as separate variable amounts. This meant adjusting payroll practice for one employee outside the company's usual field-staff structure, which the administrator had not been set up to do without direction.
3. Made up the shortfall for the period already worked. Over her first six weeks, Analyn had been paid roughly $4,200 less than the guaranteed salary structure would have produced. We advised the company to pay that difference as a lump sum and document it clearly as a correction, rather than leave a gap in the pay record that a future review could flag on its own.
4. Updated the job offer's description of her duties. Rather than treat the travel component as an undisclosed departure from the approved role, we prepared a written clarification, consistent with the original occupational classification, describing the site-visit travel as an integral part of the specialist duties already approved — attached to the file so a reviewer would see the full picture rather than an apparent gap.
5. Set up a standing compliance file and a review calendar. We put together a retained set of records — offer, contract, payroll history, and the classification clarification — organized the way a compliance officer would expect to see them, and flagged the review period during which the file should stay current in case of a random inspection.

The outcome

No inspection ever came for this file, but the company was in a position to survive one from the point the correction was made. The pay structure change added roughly $9,000 a year in guaranteed base salary to what the field-staff formula would otherwise have produced, plus the roughly $4,200 back-payment for the weeks already worked — a real but modest cost against the alternative. A confirmed compliance violation can mean fines, a public listing of the employer's name, and a ban on hiring foreign workers again for a period of time — a serious outcome for a company that depends on being able to recruit specialists it cannot always find locally.

Karim and Samir's HR administrator now runs new foreign worker hires through a short checklist before payroll is set up, matching pay structure and duties to the approved offer rather than defaulting to the company's standard field-staff template. Analyn has stayed on with the company, and her role has since expanded to cover two additional project sites — this time with a job offer amendment filed in advance rather than a gap discovered after the fact.

What you can learn from this