From 1 January 2025, the Inland Revenue will start enforcing labour relations again. The soap opera continues!
Enforcement moratorium
We have written about this topic several times in the past. Soon after the abolition of the Declaration of Employment Relationship (VAR) from 1 January 2016, it became clear that the replacement system of Wet deregulering beoordeling arbeidsrelaties (DBA) did not work properly. Therefore, the so-called enforcement moratorium instituted. Essentially, this means that the Inland Revenue only takes action in obvious situations of false self-employment.
The enforcement moratorium has been extended (and slightly adjusted) a couple of times, but by 1 January 2025, it really must come to an end for good. This will mean that the Tax Authorities will again impose sanctions when clients are found to have hired self-employed workers (ZZP-ers), who turn out not to be self-employed at all. The Tax Authority will then levy wage tax and contributions after the fact, but will also (usually) impose fines.
Particularly special
A peculiar situation now arises. Indeed, the intention was that the enforcement moratorium would be lifted as soon as the new rules around ZZP-ers were in place. However, it is now clear that those rules will definitely come into force later than 1 January 2025 (outgoing minister Van Gennep writes this in a letter to the Chamber). Exactly what the new rules will look like is also far from clear! This means that rules that have been found not to work properly will still be enforced from 2025. In a enforcement plan explains how the Inland Revenue will shape this.
It seems that for both clients and self-employed (and other self-employed) people, a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty is going to arise again. On top of that, new rules are unlikely to solve the problem, as the real solution lies in smoothing out the disparity in tax and contribution burden on profit versus wage. This gap is now very slowly being closed a little (through the phasing-out of the self-employed deduction and the reduction of the SME profit exemption), but still €1 profit yields a much higher net profit than €1 wage, so it remains interesting to enjoy your income as profit.
Memos
The Inland Revenue has also issued two memos (no less than 33 pages in total) have been published. One memo deals with the consequences for wage tax and VAT when a client is found to have worked outside employment incorrectly. The other memo deals with income tax and VAT when the ZZP-er is found not to be profit from an enterprise/result from other activities, but to be wage from employment.