[TamDenholm]

About damn time, luckily i've not been a contractor for some years now and have missed the IR35 shitshow of recent years. Having a client offering a contract having to determine if my company is an actual business or i'm just a disguised employee is a ridiculous way of doing it. Sorry but when i was contracting i was also taking on other freelance work, had long standing retainers for maintance for past clients and having junior developers working in my company doing the grunt work, thats a business, i'm not a disguised employee.

The responsiblity should be on the person to argue with HMRC that they are a business and for those legitimately operating as such, then its not at all difficult.

[mutatio]

It is difficult, for HMRC - it doesn't scale.

I am actually in favour of the IR35 legislation as it removed entire swathes of "permietractors" from the market and allowed people like myself (and you judging off the working practices you described) to operate in a true business fashion.

It is no doubt to me that 95% of "contractors" previously working "outside IR35" at large FTSE companies were indeed employees in disguise. Tenure even matched permanent staff, quite frankly it was a joke.

[TamDenholm]

I wholeheartedly agree with you, those dodging tax by just operating like a permanent employee but through a Ltd company are on the wrong side of the law. The problem i had is it punishes those operating legitimately.

Lots of laws are like this, for instance the piracy warnings that they used to put at the start of DVD's that only punished lawful users cuz if your pirated it, the warnings would be cut out. Theres many more examples like this.

[haspok]

I respectfully disagree, when you say contractors = employees.

Yes, they tenure may be just as long, but there are many other factors to take into consideration (just off the top of my head):

1. Contractors don't have a "career path" inside the organization, not even the ones that think they do.

2. They can be let go within weeks notice and no severance package.

3. They don't (really) participate in company politics.

4. They are also much easier to convince to jump ship and go next door, where the grass is greener.

5. They are responsible for managing themselves, ie. education, marketing, sales...

And there are others, like no paid holidays, etc., but everyone knows about those.

I would argue that contractors are somewhere halfway between employees and business owners. Maybe it would be the fairest to tax them so, by creating a special tax bracket for them.

It's like regulating e-rollers and e-bikes. What are they? Not bicycles really, but also not motorbikes or cars. Somewhere in between really.

[jnsaff2]

Meh. I think the ratio didn't change at all, it is just that contractors jacked up their rates to cover the added NIC. To me it seemed like someone in HMRC/govt got a "win" but all the govt agencies just had to pay more for their contractors. Almost zero-sum but actually net negative because of added bullshit.

I left UK when it only covered govt agencies so not sure what the mitigations were for private sector but I'm sure many found a way around.

[bambataa]

I agree that many contractors were more or less perm. That in turn seemed to be a consequence of the pay differential, rather than an actual desire to be a contractor.

[varispeed]

It's worth noting that length of the contract or number of clients is irrelevant from the IR35 point of view. It's a common myth.

As an employee you can just as well have many short employments and work for multiple employers.

[eeffoc67]

Regarding maintenance retainers: I have been in a loop where customers realize they haven't "used" their monthly retainer and dump requests on me in the last week of each month. Did you experience this? Would love to come up with a tactful solution to this.

[davzie]

This is happening because you pitched to them x amount of time for x amount of money. Instead re-frame it as included in the price is: server maintenance, backup scheduling, bug fixes and monitoring, minor tweaks etc.

When you frame the monthly cost like this, the customer feels almost like it's an insurance policy rather than paying for your time they aren't using.

[brtkdotse]

Havre different customers on different schedules? Customer A is on retainer 1st to 1st, customer B 10th to 10th and so on.