Project Origin

Systemic consequences extend throughout the market as a result. Evidential gaps create opportunities for loopholes, workarounds, misclassification, opaque practices and abuse. Increased regulatory intervention, additional governance processes, repeated supplier checks, more reporting requirements and intermediaries offering assurance and compliance-related accreditations all attempt to improve control. Yet each additional layer adds more time, administration and cost.

We created EPISODIC to produce a solution, and ICCE is the systematic technological response created to do so. The mission is to address the issue at source by fundamentally changing how temporary labour engagements and payments are transacted. In doing so, we aim to materially improve the commercial flexibility, compliance and ethical outcomes associated with flexible working.

Modern supply-chain compliance increasingly requires upper-chain parties to understand not only which organisations sit beneath them, but what activity those organisations create. Employment treatment, tax accountability, worker transparency, modern slavery, responsible procurement, social value and public reporting can all depend on the substance of individual labour transactions rather than the existence of supplier approval, contractual controls or general assurances.

This creates a structural difficulty. Buyers and contractors may be expected to map their supply chains and maintain visibility over participating parties, yet the relevant commercial relationships, employment arrangements, payment routes and transaction records often sit further downstream. Confidentiality, commercial sensitivity and contractual separation can prevent one participant from seeing the records held by another, while information passed upwards through declarations, invoices, payroll summaries and periodic audits may lose the detail and attribution needed to establish what actually occurred.

The result is a supply chain that may be mapped organisationally without being understood operationally. Upper-chain parties can know that a supplier exists while remaining unable to determine which parties participated in a particular route, under what terms the activity was created, how workers were engaged and paid, or what legal, financial and worker-related exposure followed. Modern compliance expectations therefore expose a weakness in the conventional model: the responsibility to understand the outcome frequently sits with parties that do not control, create or receive the underlying data.

Historically, supply-chain compliance has operated primarily downwards. Buyers and contractors establish policies, appoint suppliers, include contractual obligations and require those expectations to be passed through the chain. Assurance is then obtained through due diligence, declarations, audits and retrospective requests for evidence.

Those controls remain necessary, but they do not prove what happened within the individual transaction. Modern regulatory and procurement expectations increasingly require actual data showing who performed the work, which parties were involved, how the worker was engaged and paid, what tax and deduction treatment was applied, where the activity occurred and which project, contract or accountable party received the outcome. The research basis for this shift is set out within the available research documents .

This changes the direction of supply-chain compliance. Requirements continue to move downwards, but evidence must move upwards from the point at which the activity is created. Lower-chain transaction data becomes the basis on which upper-chain parties understand, report and defend the outcomes produced beneath them. Compliance is therefore no longer limited to instructing suppliers what to do; it increasingly depends on receiving attributable evidence of what they actually did.