> Additionally, it would be great if devices like the Fitbit Charge could be used as a bluetooth heart rate monitor that can be used on apps that consume trackers on a (presumably) standard API (like TrainerRoad, Zwift, etc).
This has already been the case for primarily fitness oriented GPS watches / heart-rate trackers / etc for some time. Bluetooth, but even longer using ANT+, which is quite a bit more battery efficient.
"Equifax flagged 283 contractors for potential 'dual employment,' documents show."
Would this not be a big flag to reclassify these contractors as employees? Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor...
In the UK there's a set of criteria (IR35) that attempt to codify the distinction. The hiring business has to make the assessment.
One of criteria is right to subcontract and freedom to work with multiple clients.
If they get it wrong, they're liable for taxes, not the Contractor.
HMRC, the UK tax body is responsible for this, and therefore it is an utter mess in practice and has had chilling effects on the UK IT consulting market.
I think it's a great idea, there's far too many businesses that exploit employees by labelling them contractors.
Of course, idea and execution are two very different things.
In NZ, it's often found in courier companies and telecommunications, where you're an owner-operator! Except you have to do what the company you work for says, when they say, and you have to provide all your own equipment, and of course, pay for your own sick leave, accident insurance and holiday pay. And no you can't work for a competitor, are you nuts?
At one point our tax department started cracking down on this, then stopped, I'm not sure why. But it needs to be done.
And let's not even discuss the infamous Hobbit law, where a right leaning government passed legislation under urgency to make all film industry employees contractors, with no rights to unionise, to keep Peter Jackson (he can get the Sir back when he redeems himself in my mind) and Warner Brothers happy after Jackson's Weta Studios lost an Employment Court case brought by a "contractor" who they very vigorously treated as an employee.
> At one point our tax department started cracking down on this, then stopped, I'm not sure why. But it needs to be done.
Around here (Poland) they tried to focus the crackdown on... contractors, planning on requiring a contractor to have at least 25% of their income from a second client to be considered self-employed and not an employee.
The local IT lobbyists had a hearty laugh about this idea and that was the end of it.
We have a similar rule in Australia that unfortunately was introduced, so called 'personal services income' if you make over 80% of your money from a single source you effectively can't make tax deductions like a business.
Yeah, that's definitely the wrong place to focus - focus on the employers, as they're the ones who reap the benefits of treating employees as contractors.
The thing is that in IT people actually want to be outside of IR35 because being a contractor is financially better for them.
So you see contractor job ads prominently listing "outside of IR35" as a benefit.
When this was implemented I know people who actually quit because they were told they would be within IR35 from then on, and they found new contracts outside of IR35.
In IT/tech people go the contracting route for the money so unsurprisingly they follow the money...
It's just a matter of rates. You need rates a bit higher within IR35. Less so than people think, and even less now that the corporation tax changes are still going through. The biggest problem with IR35 is no longer tax since the gap has become smaller and smaller, but the uncertainty of the classification and the hassle of dealing with an umbrella company.
> I think it's a great idea, there's far too many businesses that exploit employees by labelling them contractors.
In UK (and Aus), this whole IT/dev contracting business is kind of win:win (govt. loses) though - devs like it because they get paid $$$ day rates and pay less tax, businesses like it because... capex vs opex(?).
The US tax authority (IRS) has a similar set of rules; if you can set your hours and working conditions and have your own equipment or tools it justifies not being an employee. There are of course important corner conditions like hiring a contractor who operates some machine you own.
In general, though some people prefer to be contractors, these rules are in place because some employers try to classify de facto employees as contractors to avoid paying taxes or providing required benefits. Google, FB etc have complex contractor rules for their third party contractor agencies to steer clear of that and make sure they save on taxes and benefits.
> if you can set your hours and working conditions and have your own equipment or tools it justifies not being an employee. There are of course important corner conditions like hiring a contractor who operates some machine you own.
Note that security guards can be structured as contractors despite obviously not being able to choose where or when they work. There's a big list of things that "weigh in favor" of one status or the other. There aren't definitive answers unless you've recently won a lawsuit against the government (which always wants employee status for everyone).
The guards are still usually W-2 employees; but they’re employees of the firm that’s been contracted. Referring to them as “contractors” is more a colloquialism, but it marks someone that works for an outside firm versus someone that’s in-house and on the company team, even if they work in the same office day in and day out.
Yeah, there's a big disparity between UK and US terminology here.
I'm the UK, a "contractor" is typically in business on their own account, applying for jobs directly to the end client.
In the US, it seems like a "contractor" frequently works for an outsourcing company. In the UK we'd typically call these people "temps" or "consultancy staff" depending on the source.
It's Temp/Vendor/Contractor lumped together as "people who work here but allegedly aren't legally employees of thia company, so we can deceive about all the great benefits "all" our "employees" get.
Doesn’t consultancy staff also cover people working for an actual consulting company?
I have worked on long contract - one or two years - for clients in the past helping them structure and put in place large projects and while I was technically there full time it was pretty clear that this was temporary, I was filling a punctual need the business wouldn’t have after and there was a somewhat clear idea of when we would part.
These relations are not necessary a way to pay less or not give benefits. I was actually paid a lot better than if I had been working there.
> In the US, it seems like a "contractor" frequently works for an outsourcing company. In the UK we'd typically call these people "temps" or "consultancy staff" depending on the source.
I think contractor is still used in that case in the UK sometimes too. The obvious example being construction firms.
Are security guards employed as 1099 common? I was under the impression that most companies were just outsourcing and guards were actually full time employees of companies specialising in security in the same way most cleaning staff works for a cleaning company.
I think guards are a bit different. Don’t companies usually contract a security company and they hire employees (or get contractors who might work for multiple companies)? Those companies are free to choose which gigs they want.
There was a significant part of the UK IT consulting market which was not really consulting though right? People turning up and doing the same job day in day out for months or years.
At least in the IT industry people legitimately had some freedoms. I was amused to learn that a lot of lorry drivers were operating as contractors outside IR35. Not even those driving their own vehicles. The driving regulations make it pretty difficult for one driver to do anything different from another driver.
I’m a contractor, and for many companies and recruiters it was a wink wink nudge nudge arrangement to keep a gravy train running. An element of that will return when the reform is scrapped.
It's not entirely true. Just because such right exists in the contract, does not mean it is valid. HMRC guidances have a ton of rules where it does not count. For instance if the business could use the sub-contractor directly.
> and freedom to work with multiple clients.
This is also irrelevant, because exclusive supply agreements is a normal business practice. Also people can hold multiple employments and that does not make them "contractors". People can also be contractors and employees at the same time and anything in between.
> If they get it wrong, they're liable for taxes, not the Contractor.
That's not entirely correct either. The client can claw the money back from the Contractor and very much every contract I have seen has clauses ensuring that any unpaid tax the client is liable for will be re-paid by the contractor.
Which means it’s essentially going away. I first encountered it in 2005 when I first contracted & it has never affected me. It nearly affected me with my previous contract a couple of years ago as the business really didn’t understand it and was “playing safe” by trying to go “inside IR35” for the role, but that’s utter nonsense for a 3 month engagement such as the one I was doing. I’ve always paid employers NI etc. I don’t understand why they don’t change Ltd company dividends & up the %age for the first £100k or so - it’d effectively solve the problem they’re trying to fix (lost tax/NI revenue), without all the messing about.
Even with the current tax rates, it's not clear to me that it's a net tax gain for HMRC to push contractors to being permanent. A contractor typically charges VAT - which can more than make up for other taxes - especially if their day rate is higher than it would be on an employee salary.
I think most people forget that when contractor pays itself a dividend, that money comes from the profit which they also pay corporation tax on.
Then it's very much like PAYE. Only difference is that the client does not have to pay Employers NI, which is fine, because they are not an employer.
But taxes on dividends got higher and higher in recent years.
You can still work for years in the UK, accumulate money (or real estate / other investment) in the company - then you move to Dubai and withdraw dividends tax free.
You end up paying 19% corp tax rate on your income that you can access only after you're done with the UK - which is not great compared to lower taxed countries in Europe (Malta at 5% being the best), but you get access to the London only jobs which pay a bit more (even if now that's not really true in a post remote working world).
Definitely better than getting equivalent salary and being forced to stash money in a pension you'll see when you're 60 or pay 40% taxes
The majority of IT contractors are going to be bringing in over £85k/annum, which means they're going to be registered for VAT, which means they will be providing VAT invoices to their client, which means their client is going to claim the VAT back from HMRC.
So what? The company still generated the VAT revenue.
The customer gets a refund, but has to charge their own customer VAT on the full amount of the goods they are selling, so the VAT accumulates until it is paid by someone who cannot claim the VAT back
That's why it's called "value added tax" - each supplier in the chain generates VAT on the value they add.
Which in practice means that yes, IR35 is going away, because HMRC is not going to audit every single contractor, unless they make a significant amount of money, and those that do make a significant amount of money, are almost certainly going to fall outside of IR35
I believe contractor in this sense is more like staff augmentation, e.g. Equifax pays a fee to $COMPANY, who, employs (W2) John Doe to work 40h/wk at Equifax as a "contractor." It's very common in local/state/federal government to have these C2C (company-to-company) contracting arrangements to get around regulatory or legislative limits on government employee pay.
This is actually much more of an issue than someone just holding two W2 jobs, because these "contractors" are almost always billing hours, and if you're billing the same hour to two people that very quickly approaches actual fraud.
I've done this type of work in the past and I agree. It's probably contracting between companies, but the worker is likely an actual W2 employee of the contracting agency.
The catch however, is that this doesn't necessarily absolve Equifax of miscategorizing workers -- this was the subject of the famous Microsoft Permatemp lawsuit. It is possible for a W2 worker of a temping agency to also be considered a common law employee of the contracting corporation. In Vizcaino v Microsoft, the temps were found to be Microsoft employees -- even though they were also w2 employees of third party staffing agencies.
Good to know. I’m a contractor and am just starting my own business separate from my main contracting role. Was curious what precedent there is for this dynamic
Edit: I was under the impression being a contractor would give one flexibility to do whatever they want when they’re not billing hours, depends on the contract wording of course
In fact, I've seen contractors (who want to be contractors) who limit the hours they work for any single client so there's no question as to whether they're an employee or not.
The State of California prohibits firing for certain causes and if you are fired for those reasons you can file a complaint with the Labor Commissioner and they're authorized to collect lost wages from your former employer on your behalf.
If I contract you to do 10 hours of a task per week, and you say you did 10 hours but actually only did 5, you faked the hours and have violated our contract.
Right, but you can only put so much control in the contract before you're not contracting. And that's going to depend on jurisdiction too. So I was hoping for a contextual overview of that tradeoff.
I think the typical line on this sort of thing is that you can contract someone for a set number of hours, but if you also dictate when those hours will be worked you’ve probably reclassified them as an employee. The other key test in the UK is the ability for a contractor to substitute themselves for another person to get the job done.
So the company in question has what legal right to investigate the employees of their contractors? Did the contractor’s employees sign off on this? It seems unlikely.
A better remedy would be to fire the contract partner if you feel the work isn’t meeting the value you expect.
If you read the article and look at the differences, they fired the Equifax employees outright. They "flagged" a bunch of contractors. That almost certainly means they sent that list of contractors to their employer companies and requested additional verification of hours and/or requested they be removed from their projects.
>> Services available to the market
>>
>> An independent contractor is generally free to seek out business opportunities. Independent contractors often advertise, maintain a visible business location, and are available to work in the relevant market.
But it does mean that. If you aren't free to seek business opportunities, your services aren't available to the market. It's a factor, not the factor.
Yeah, I'd love for someone who is familiar with this to weigh in. I was under the impression that this was one of the features that defines contractors.
If I'm paying you as an employer for a tenporary full time stint, say 50 hrs. work/week and you're not actually punching in and out of time clock for me to track you, I might have suspicions that you're in fact short changing me on the time or quality of work you contracted if you're also working another job. I might be wrong, and you'd have a right to contest that, but I'd probably be right more than wrong on average.
If you are an actual employee of mine it's even more likely you are in breach.
No employment contract or agreement I've ever seen has prohibited someone from holding two W2 positions. Competing, sure. Sharing trade secrets is already illegal. Double-billing hours (e.g. on invoices or hourly work) is already illegal.
You're falling into a number of traps, not the least of which is thinking anyone who does contracting would ever agree to 50h/wk for a single client. "I'd be right more than I'd be wrong" is not sufficient justification to put additional requirements on a contract that almost certainly were not there to begin with.
All they really do is handle tokenization and pci compliance. They're not an active participant in the financial process, basically just a technical proxy. Thus no risk (to them) of charge backs or anything like that, so aside from you not paying your bill, they would have little to no reason to nuke your account.
They're just a tech solution orchestrating (recurring) payments to your payment processors. So they don't have to do the same checks as processors. So they are only a technical single point of failure.
The new charge 6 does have this capability. [0]
[0](https://support.google.com/fitbit/answer/14236705)