In general terms, company job applications include a section referring to the personal details of the workers, such as their marital status, the number of children, their home address, their telephone number, among others, with the aim of having the basic details of the person to be hired.
In some cases, this basic data also serves as a basis for determining the existence of rights contemplated in the Labor Code, such as the leave granted in section c) of art. 74 referring to leave for serious illness of a member of the family unit living under the same roof if the illness requires their indispensable presence, or permission to attend medical appointments for minor or disabled children and, in other cases, the address and/or telephone number to contact the worker or their family in the event of absences for several days that would be considered as abandonment of work and/or to provide the home address to the labour authority for the respective notifications, whether of administrative or judicial proceedings.
Updating the worker’s personal details is, in most cases, included in the internal regulations as an obligation that is important for both the worker and the employer, especially the address of the employee in cases of accidents that the worker may suffer while traveling from their home to their workplace.
Before handing in the NAT form (the document used to inform the INSS of the work-related accident), the employer must carry out an internal investigation to confirm whether the incident that occurred to the worker on the way to or from work fulfills the three determining elements that characterize work-related accidents:
- The teleological one, which consists of the fact that it is a commuting accident, occurs to the worker from his home to his workplace or vice versa, without breaking that link with work.
- The geographical one is when there has been no deviation on the journey.
- The temporal one refers to the fact that no other business has been carried out by the worker during that journey.
On many occasions, the address stated on the worker’s identity card does not coincide with their current address, because people change their address without updating the address on their identity card.
From a labor point of view, it is important that the worker, if he changes his address, updates this information with the company, otherwise, if he has an accident on the way to work from his new address, the employer will not be able to report this incident as a commuting accident since, according to his records, the teleological or geographical element would not be met.
This does not prevent the INSS from being asked later to investigate the accident to confirm and/or rule out whether or not it is considered to be a commuting accident, which will involve procedures with the INSS that could take time.
Just as reporting a false commuting accident has financial consequences for the employer due to the application of fines by the INSS, failure to report it because the worker did not update their address can lead to delays in the classification of the accident or it may be ruled out as such by the INSS because it does not comply with the constituent elements of the accident, as mentioned above, with negative consequences for the worker due to the differences in the INSS’s responsibility for work-related accidents and accidents of common origin.