What are best practices around off-payroll compliance?

Best practice is essential to implement a fair assessment regime which in turn will ensure you can attract and retain the best contracting talent whilst also minimising your long term risk:

Here are five simple tips:

• Make accurate and fair assessments. If you fail to do that, contractors will avoid working for you, costs will go up, and it will be harder to attract the best talent.
• If you only want to hire PAYE based contractors, remove IR35 from your vocabulary, and instruct agencies to do so accordingly. Otherwise you may still have to produce Status Determination Statements, handle status disputes, and you could find yourself unwittingly building up tax risk without even being aware.
• Be mindful of scaremongering. If you do things right, the risks of getting it wrong are minimal. You don’t need to put everyone on payroll, and neither do you need to over-insure the risk as if every contractor on your books will be caught out by HMRC at a later date.
• If you want a temporary employment relationship, then hire the worker on a fixed term contract, or as an agency worker on payroll. Be diligent if you choose to allow the use of payroll schemes.
• Use independent status experts if you do not have the expertise in-house. The topic is complex and HMRC takes between 3 to 5 years to train their own status inspectors. If you need help, hire firms with proven experience.

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