You don’t have to search the internet for very long to realise that there is a great deal of unease amongst self-employed workers in the Netherlands. What is the cause? The abolition of the VAR (Declaration of Employment Relationship), which will come into force on 1 May 2016 pursuant to the bill on the Deregulation of the Assessment of Employment Relationships (DBA), which has now been published in the Government Gazette. See also our article The final chapter of the VAR.
Clients
This unease is felt not only amongst the self-employed, but certainly also amongst their clients. With the abolition of the VAR, these business owners are now obliged to reassess the risks associated with employing staff within their businesses, evaluate them and then consider how best to keep these risks within acceptable limits.
In many companies, this analysis of the risks associated with the use of labour could well lead to business owners feeling compelled to reorganise the flexible labour pool around their business – a pool that is so essential to business continuity. This can be done in various ways. We estimate that there is a fairly high likelihood that, as a result of the abolition of the VAR, this will be at the expense of self-employed workers without employees.
Incidentally, that also seems to be, at least in part, the government’s intention. The main reason for abolishing the VAR is, after all, to separate the wheat from the chaff. In other words: to separate the ‘bogus self-employed’ (the chaff) from the genuinely self-employed ZZP workers (the wheat). We’ll leave it open as to when ZZP workers should be regarded as bogus self-employed.
Fewer self-employed people
However, the whole operation is certainly intended to lead to a reduction in the number of self-employed workers active in the Netherlands. The tool the government is using to achieve this aim is to make the client jointly responsible for assessing whether self-employed workers they hire are genuine self-employed workers. As a guide, model contracts approved by the Tax and Customs Administration are made available; however, if it subsequently transpires that the work was not actually carried out in accordance with that model contract, tax and social security contributions will still be levied. That bill will be passed on to the client, who may be able to recover part of it from the self-employed workers.
Parliamentary questions
Members of the House of Representatives Mei Li Vos and Groot have Parliamentary questions questions put to State Secretary Wiebes of Finance regarding the concerns amongst self-employed workers. However, we suspect that the answers to most of these questions are quite obvious. After all, the Tax and Customs Administration has already provided those answers in a factsheet in which the service would have us believe that it’s all still very straightforward. The coming period will tell us whether that is indeed the case.