Government clampdown on 'invoicing cooperatives' and temporary job contracts
Friday, January 26, 2018 @ 9:29 AM
A CRACKDOWN in the ministry of employment has led to over 6,000 people being forced to register as self-employed after their 'invoicing cooperative' schemes were declared illegal.
These cooperatives take on people who work for themselves as employees and, instead of members sending out their own invoices as the self-employed are required to do, these would be issued in the name of the cooperative, who also handled all their accounting transactions.
This way, members would save money on accountants' fees, be partially protected from non-paying customers, and would be paying their 'stamp' as an employee of the cooperative rather than the fixed self-employed monthly fee, which starts at €275.01 and is not graded according to earnings.
This monthly Social Security fee is a headache for seven in 10 self-employed workers, according to a recent survey, and the number of sole traders who work cash-in-hand because they cannot afford the fixed amount is difficult to ascertain.
Cooperatives, which have been advertising widely in the last few years, appeared to be a solution as membership fees were a percentage of earnings.
But employment minister Fátima Báñez says they are not legal and calls them 'a company structure used to commit Social Security fraud'.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com