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"Equifax flagged 283 contractors for potential 'dual employment,' documents show." Would this not be a big flag to reclassify these contractors as employees?

"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...

throwawaysleep 4y ago
You get a lot of this up here in Canada. Companies hire you as a contractor, but prohibit you from working other roles.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  I can provide another anecdatum to that claim.
- kevincox 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure this isn't legal in most provinces.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    It isn't, but everyone does it, including the federal government.
- jejeyyy77 4y ago
  They can’t prohibit you from working other roles. That’s the whole point of being an “independent contractor”. Most contractors I know take on many clients.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dieselgate 4y ago
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
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
- jollofricepeas 4y ago
  Word of unsolicited advice: 1. Paying a business attorney in your state upfront for q&a is cheaper than paying them later when things go wrong. 2. Please don’t get your legal advice from HN.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    The only legal advice anyone should accept from HN is "contact an attorney in your jurisdiction"
    - bigiain 4y ago
      I dunno. “Only ever break one law at a time” is pretty universally good advice. But yeah. Call a lawyer… Preferably well before you need one in a hurry.
      - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
        > “Only ever break one law at a time” is pretty universally good advice. If you’re breaking zero laws, stop.
- gnopgnip 4y ago
  If you are in CA you have a "right to moonlight" provided there is no conflict of interest. In probably 47 other states you could be fired for your activity outside of work even without a conflict of interest.
  - pc86 4y ago
    You can still be fired "for no reason" in CA at any time. It's still at-will employment.
sirsinsalot 4y ago
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.
- gumby 4y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > 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).
    - hervature 4y ago
      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.
gumby 4y ago
The article says that they don’t know if any contractors were terminated; they only know about employees. They could terminate them if they could show that the contractors were faking the hours.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  To what extent can you demand hours from a contractor?
  - krater23 4y ago
    To the extend that he had contractual confirmed to you.
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    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.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      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.
      - jon-wood 4y ago
        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.
  - msh 4y ago
    If they were billing by the hour, or being payed to standby.
heavyset_go 4y ago
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.
caturopath 4y ago
A lot of the time 'contractor' is used to refer to a W-2 employee of a staffing company rather than an independent contractor.
- alex_young 4y ago
  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.
  - pc86 4y ago
    You can investigate whatever you want. 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.
    - nullfield 4y ago
      I’m more interested at what point they’re violating the FCRA, because I feel like they have to be somehow
- jejeyyy77 4y ago
  That’s actually illegal on the part of the company.
lr4444lr 4y ago
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.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Sure but this has nothing to do with the ethical basis of using such data to discover that or the legal basis of the contractor/employer designation.
- pc86 4y ago
  In breach of what? 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.
varispeed 4y ago
> Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor... This is very common misconception. People can have multiple employers just like contractors can have multiple clients. It has no bearing.
- nulbyte 4y ago
  It is not a misconception in the U.S. This is one of many factors in determining the correct classification. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/financial-control https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
  - varispeed 4y ago
    Well, the article linked does not say that. > Services available to the market Does not mean the business cannot have a one client at a time.
    - nulbyte 4y ago
      >> 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.
pc86 4y ago
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.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...
marcosdumay 4y ago
In my country (Brazil) if the company shows any care about people working on two jobs, it's enough evidence to determine they are employees. (Famously, this made Uber grant some rights to their drivers here.)

throwawaysleep 4y ago

You get a lot of this up here in Canada. Companies hire you as a contractor, but prohibit you from working other roles.

revolvingocelot 4y ago
I can provide another anecdatum to that claim.
kevincox 4y ago
I'm pretty sure this isn't legal in most provinces.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  It isn't, but everyone does it, including the federal government.
jejeyyy77 4y ago
They can’t prohibit you from working other roles. That’s the whole point of being an “independent contractor”. Most contractors I know take on many clients.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dieselgate 4y ago

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

ghaff 4y ago
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.
jollofricepeas 4y ago
Word of unsolicited advice: 1. Paying a business attorney in your state upfront for q&a is cheaper than paying them later when things go wrong. 2. Please don’t get your legal advice from HN.
- Aloha 4y ago
  The only legal advice anyone should accept from HN is "contact an attorney in your jurisdiction"
  - bigiain 4y ago
    I dunno. “Only ever break one law at a time” is pretty universally good advice. But yeah. Call a lawyer… Preferably well before you need one in a hurry.
    - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
      > “Only ever break one law at a time” is pretty universally good advice. If you’re breaking zero laws, stop.
gnopgnip 4y ago
If you are in CA you have a "right to moonlight" provided there is no conflict of interest. In probably 47 other states you could be fired for your activity outside of work even without a conflict of interest.
- pc86 4y ago
  You can still be fired "for no reason" in CA at any time. It's still at-will employment.

sirsinsalot 4y ago

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.

gumby 4y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > 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).
  - hervature 4y ago
    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.

gumby 4y ago

The article says that they don’t know if any contractors were terminated; they only know about employees. They could terminate them if they could show that the contractors were faking the hours.

Dylan16807 4y ago
To what extent can you demand hours from a contractor?
- krater23 4y ago
  To the extend that he had contractual confirmed to you.
- akerl_ 4y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    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.
    - jon-wood 4y ago
      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.
- msh 4y ago
  If they were billing by the hour, or being payed to standby.

heavyset_go 4y ago

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.

caturopath 4y ago

A lot of the time 'contractor' is used to refer to a W-2 employee of a staffing company rather than an independent contractor.

alex_young 4y ago
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.
- pc86 4y ago
  You can investigate whatever you want. 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.
  - nullfield 4y ago
    I’m more interested at what point they’re violating the FCRA, because I feel like they have to be somehow
jejeyyy77 4y ago
That’s actually illegal on the part of the company.

lr4444lr 4y ago

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.

ethanbond 4y ago
Sure but this has nothing to do with the ethical basis of using such data to discover that or the legal basis of the contractor/employer designation.
pc86 4y ago
In breach of what? 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.

varispeed 4y ago

> Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor... This is very common misconception. People can have multiple employers just like contractors can have multiple clients. It has no bearing.

nulbyte 4y ago
It is not a misconception in the U.S. This is one of many factors in determining the correct classification. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/financial-control https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
- varispeed 4y ago
  Well, the article linked does not say that. > Services available to the market Does not mean the business cannot have a one client at a time.
  - nulbyte 4y ago
    >> 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.

pc86 4y ago

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.

throwaway09223 4y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...

marcosdumay 4y ago

In my country (Brazil) if the company shows any care about people working on two jobs, it's enough evidence to determine they are employees. (Famously, this made Uber grant some rights to their drivers here.)