5 ms·

Over the last 8 months I had 158 billable hours on average per month. I get about one to four calls per month offering projects (full time, 3-6+ months) in my c

Over the last 8 months I had 158 billable hours on average per month. I get about one to four calls per month offering projects (full time, 3-6+ months) in my city or fully remote at that rate without doing any active marketing. I just have a Xing profile and I am listed at a couple of job adviser agencies such as Gulp or Hays. Also I only do full time projects (for me they have been by far the majority anyway). So either it's webdev specific right now or I am just incredibly lucky but even as my current project is near its end I have about 3 options to chose from to continue elsewhere seamlessly after. Other freelancers I met in the field have reported similar situations but that's just anecdotal evidence. Would you have a reference of where that 50% unpaid time comes from?

zvr 5y ago
Ah, so your freelancing is essentially working full time for a single customer for 3-6 months. As if you were changing (salaried) jobs this often. Thanks for the explanation. A question: doesn't the tax authority complain about the lack of multiple customers?
- Escapado 5y ago
  Yep, that's correct. And no they don't most of the time. Investigations about this are rare apparently and also only working for one customer in that capacity at a time is not really an indication of pseudo self-employment or tax fraud. If the company dictates you your work hours and you suddenly appear in organisational diagrams as if you were employed and you were part of all company meetings and a couple of other things in the same vain then that would be indicative of pseudo self-employment. It's basically mostly about whether you are bound by instructions or not. This is however checked rarely (usually it would need to be initiated by one of the participating parties and we do not want that) and also hard to do rigorously. The laws around that are mainly to protect people from earning too little and being subject to paying all their social insurances/taxes by themselves and not getting any vacation days. For higher paying jobs this is not much of a threat since being paid higher than an average FTE would also count as indicative for being self-employed. Same goes with working from wherever I want (yay homeoffice). If pseudo-self employment were ascertained during an audit my customer would need to retroactively pay the social insurances for the months I worked for him and if he were to employ me further he could deduct that from my income of the following months but only for the last three or four months. I think there is a chance under very specific circumstances that the customer could try to demand that I would have to pay the difference between what a normal FTE would be paid compared to what I was paid but it's not yet clear whether that is actually lawful and I think it only applies if both parties were not entirely clear that the business relation ship is based on the premise of freelancing. All in all I am not very concerned that it will actually ever be a real problem. I have talked to at least two dozen freelancers doing what I do. Sometimes for over a decade and never once have they been questioned in their status in any way.

zvr 5y ago

Ah, so your freelancing is essentially working full time for a single customer for 3-6 months. As if you were changing (salaried) jobs this often. Thanks for the explanation. A question: doesn't the tax authority complain about the lack of multiple customers?

Escapado 5y ago
Yep, that's correct. And no they don't most of the time. Investigations about this are rare apparently and also only working for one customer in that capacity at a time is not really an indication of pseudo self-employment or tax fraud. If the company dictates you your work hours and you suddenly appear in organisational diagrams as if you were employed and you were part of all company meetings and a couple of other things in the same vain then that would be indicative of pseudo self-employment. It's basically mostly about whether you are bound by instructions or not. This is however checked rarely (usually it would need to be initiated by one of the participating parties and we do not want that) and also hard to do rigorously. The laws around that are mainly to protect people from earning too little and being subject to paying all their social insurances/taxes by themselves and not getting any vacation days. For higher paying jobs this is not much of a threat since being paid higher than an average FTE would also count as indicative for being self-employed. Same goes with working from wherever I want (yay homeoffice). If pseudo-self employment were ascertained during an audit my customer would need to retroactively pay the social insurances for the months I worked for him and if he were to employ me further he could deduct that from my income of the following months but only for the last three or four months. I think there is a chance under very specific circumstances that the customer could try to demand that I would have to pay the difference between what a normal FTE would be paid compared to what I was paid but it's not yet clear whether that is actually lawful and I think it only applies if both parties were not entirely clear that the business relation ship is based on the premise of freelancing. All in all I am not very concerned that it will actually ever be a real problem. I have talked to at least two dozen freelancers doing what I do. Sometimes for over a decade and never once have they been questioned in their status in any way.