Two months before I’m self-employed: ‘What rules do I have to abide by?’

• Billie Slagboom

  economics editor

“Wow, that’s changing a lot,” says a freelance security guard (20) at a data center. He is currently completing the self-employed check from the Ministry of Social Affairs, but he could answer yes and no to many questions. “Sometimes I have the same client for a longer period of time, sometimes more than one. It depends on what I find.”

After ten questions, it turned out that there are six characteristics of a self-employed person and four of an employee. The music teacher Johan van der Zwet also makes the check. The result is 50/50. “Now explain, what rules must I abide by?”

In just two months, the Tax Authorities will increase the enforcement of fraudulent self-employment. And although the government promises not in 2025 to study “hysterically”.there is still much unrest among the self-employed.

Companies want to hire them, and some are responding to the crisis with advertisements. “The difficult future for the self-employed? Get paid with…”. But many self-employed people want to stay on their own because of the freedom it gives them.

A few weeks ago, the Tax Authorities published the so-called evaluation framework, but this still does not provide enough clarity for some self-employed people and clients. The new business check also raises questions.

“It’s not an amount,” says assistant professor of employment law Niels van der Neut from the University of Amsterdam. “You may have five or six situations that point in the direction of self-employment, but you are still not self-employed. If you are embedded in the organization, or if the client tells you how to do your job, then you are an employee after all.”

“The Tax Authorities are committed to providing information,” says Van der Neut. “They hope that the parties themselves will take responsibility.” The success of this approach is still questionable. “I hope it works, but when it comes to money, I don’t think people take that shared responsibility.”

He believes the law is clear. “I think a lot of people would come to the same answer if you asked someone in the street if someone was self-employed or not. ” He believes that very few self-employed people fall into a gray area.

“People are used to the fact that almost anything was possible in the last eight years, because there was no coercion. And independent work was cheaper for all parties.” But a large proportion of currently self-employed people are not, Van der Neut thinks. “That’s the sad thing too, that it concerns such a large group. “

While many companies are investigating whether and how they can still work with self-employed people in the new year, more and more companies are announcing that they will stop working with non- connected

A quarter of self-employed people are already missing out on assignments as a result, the consultancy group Headfirst surveyed in September. “And that hasn’t gone up since then,” said Cristel van de Ven, chairman of the Self-Employed Association of the Netherlands. “They are now saying that they are going to start smoothly, but in in the meantime nothing has changed in the rules that people look at, hence the unrest.”

Music teacher Van der Zwet chose to be employed three days a week. “I didn’t want to experience suddenly hearing from clients halfway through the school year that they didn’t want to do it anymore, and they no longer have an income.”

Geert Sijtzma from the security company ISA Security has already stopped employing more than half of his self-employed people. “Self-employed people do not meet the requirements of the law,” he says. “They wear our clothes, get instructions from us. There is always a relationship of authority.” All he wants is a flexible shell of freelancers.

Stopping the self-employed except when ‘sick and peak’ is accepted as a new guideline by many organisations. But it is often no longer possible to use freelancers in the event of illness or at peak times.

If the self-employed person does the same work in the same conditions as the worker he replaces, he may still be unemployed. “That is not possible as a self-employed person,” said Minister Van Hijum in the House of Representatives.

Sijtzma would think it would be better if the Tax Authorities investigated self-employed people instead of clients. “It’s really crazy, because we didn’t want our employees to work alone. They wanted to work for themselves.”