The big one was the "benefits". If the Umbrella corp offers, say a brand new laptop as an employee benefit, which they lease for you and simply deduct from the

The big one was the "benefits". If the Umbrella corp offers, say a brand new laptop as an employee benefit, which they lease for you and simply deduct from the total amount paid by the customer, and not from your salary, you can essentially obtain a laptop by paying for it with pretax dollars. You could basically extend this to everything... cars, first class airfare, hotels, superbowl tickets etc. Theoretically, you could do all of this as a contractor too, but you pay the umbrella corp for the hassle of balancing the books for you, while you collect a salary and pay income tax instead. In Canada, where contractors are responsible for charging GST and remitting it to the government, and employees aren't, these types of companies could save a lot of hassle.