kentoh/AdobeStock
花费优雅欢迎来自联合创始人的Martin Konrad的这次旅客帖子Shortlist是一家位于旧金山的自由职业者管理系统提供商和伦敦办事处。
The UK government has announced that the IR35 reform introduced to the public sector in 2017 will also be rolled out to the private sector in April 2020.
What does this mean? In less than nine months, all medium and large private sector businesses using freelancers will be responsible for checking their employment status with every engagement. If it is determined that freelancers should be treated as an employee for the purposes of IR35, the business will need to deduct income tax and national insurance contributions from payments made to freelancers.
As the private sector relies heavily on freelance workers, this reform will have a significant impact on the entire freelancer economy in the United Kingdom.
In this article, I would like to discuss how companies can determine their freelancer's IR35 status, and how your company can prepare for the upcoming reform.
How to Determine IR35 Status
Firstly, it’s important to understand that it isn’t the freelancers being judged on IR35 status, but the specific contract.
Therefore, it’s important to know whether terms and conditions in the contract or the freelancer’s working arrangement constitute employment, rather than a business-to-business arrangement. If there’s evidence to suggest employment, one of your contracts could be caught by the new legislation.
有三个要素在决定自由职业者的合同是否在IR35立法下落下的关键部分。这些是：
Substitution— Basically, the freelancer is providing services as a company and should be engaged as a business, not an individual. Also, the skills required to perform the service are the company’s — not the individual’s. Consequently, as long as the services can be carried out satisfactorily, the freelancer’s company should be able to assign whichever representatives it wants.
在大多数情况下，自由职业者显然是公司唯一的人，但它至关重要的是“替代权”在书面合同中，它存在于现实中。
监督，方向和控制- 客户在自由职业者提供的服务中由客户提供的服务级别在确定IR35状态时非常重要。
In some circumstances it is acceptable for a freelancer to mutually agree with the client to provide a particular service at a specific time and place, but he should not be subject to any control or supervision from the client. Further, it should be clear that the freelancer is able to provide the service however they choose to do so.
Mutuality of obligation (MOO)— In simple terms, this means that in order for an employment relationship to exist, there must be an obligation on a client (work provider) to provide work and an obligation on the individual to carry out the work. On the contrary, a self-employed individual such as a freelancer will provide the service they are being contracted to provide and will finish with no further expectation of work.
Therefore, it is important that a freelancer has the right to walk away from a contract early if they so choose.
有一些其他指标是自由职业者和客户之间的关系可以是就业类型的关系。这些指标包括财务风险，解雇权和排他性权利，但它们的重量远远低于上述三个关键要素。
How to prepare for IR35 and minimize the risk
后一个IR3的决心5 applies to a contract, the client will have several new responsibilities — including payment calculation on behalf of the freelancer, tax and NIC deductions, reporting to HMRC, record-keeping and sending worker P45 forms at the end of the contract.
没有适当的工具和流程，这可能导致可能导致大量毯子的负担，这通常可能导致整个自由职业者劳动力被放置在IR35内，这对于运营真正业务的自由职业者来说是不公平的。在IR35内部工作的成本对于自由职业者来说是非常重要的，即这些个人想要的是对工作安排的公平审查。
尽管猜测，但更改是可管理的。有几件事在私营部门现在可以做准备。
1.采取措施识别为您的公司工作的自由职业者
Regardless of whether you work at a medium or large private sector company, you should identify the freelancers your company engages.
What is their population? What is their current IR35 status? Will they be working on this particular project come next April? How important are they to the delivery of your key targets?
It’s good to start by implementing a system of records that can quickly gather information from your spreadsheets into one centralized database. Modern FMS systems like Shortlist’s will let you easily configure a survey that automatically creates freelancer profiles as they answer the questions.
2. Review your contracts
Many of the key elements of deciding whether IR35 should be applied to a freelancer are stipulated under your contractor agreement, so this document could determine whether the off-payroll rules apply.
Thus, it is vital to start reviewing your existing contracts, roles and responsibilities to ensure that freelancers are sufficiently distanced from the business so as to be truly self-employed.
Where it is clearly evident that supervision and control is required, or right of substitution isn’t allowed in the contract, then the HMRC will most likely assume that despite the freelancer being seemingly self-employed via their own limited company they are in fact an employee of your business, and fall under IR35.
Avoid adding:
- Start and finish times appearing in the contract
- Specific days the freelancer should work in the contract
- Including lunch break times and duration in the contract.
- Specific clauses stating that the client has supervision and control over the freelancer
Look for a tool that can automatically add job fields to the contract based on your template, so the process of creating a job and requesting approval is more streamlined.
3. Implement new policies
Communicating the upcoming changes to your team is an important part of execution, and it’s where seeking the appropriate technology solution or professional service could prove extremely helpful.
Starting with the job advertising, these job ads should make it absolutely clear whether the role is for the contracted period of work to be conducted by a self-employed freelancer or whether it is intended as a more permanent internal role.
Moving on to an on-boarding procedure, every new freelancer should provide you with evidence that they are a genuine business. You will need to collect and verify information such as incorporation documents, insurance, VAT registration certificate, and ideally, the information should be vetted by experienced workforce classification specialists that can determine the IR35 status.
最后，您希望建立一个新的过程，介绍了对工作分配的一些治理。尽管您的自由职业者已成功通过了初始筛选和登机，但它可以将他或她置于IR35的规定内部的工作安排。
4.与您的自由职业者沟通
Your freelancers need reassurance that in the light of upcoming reform you will prioritise accurate IR35 determination, allowing them to operate outside the IR35 legislation. It’s best to start communicating your plans early, as well as any changes.
5. Use the right tools
Implementing changes without the right software to support you can be unduly challenging and expensive. A modernfreelancer management system（FMS）可以自动化筛选，登上和自由职业者参与的过程。有的提供商如候选名单，也可以与人才管理技术一起提供法律专业知识和工资服务。
通过提前实施必要的流程，教育员工，以及使用正确的工具，大多数雇主都应该能够避免任何潜在的负债 - 同时确保他们使用的自由职业者完全了解改变如何影响他们的变化。
Private sector organisations have just nine months to prepare for changes to off-payroll working, rules that will put the burden of categorizing contractors’ and contingent workers’ tax statuses onto the businesses that hire them.
Discuss this: