Re: The simple answer ...
The ir35 legislation is awful and always was. HMRC don't even understand it.
Businesses don't understand it - fact.
And actually it is murky as to whether in some cases you are a contractor or not.
The issue here isn't IR35 because its been about since gordon brown and we all work under it every day. The issue here is the change of responsibility. HMRC couldn't win cases against us because quite frankly we made sure we were engaged correctly as contractors. What they have chosen to do is to move the liability so risk averse customers will decided all their stuff is inside ir35 OR that they don't want to take the risk and so move to using large consultancies that employ people on lesser wages but pimp them out for thousands a day.
Everyone looses here aside the government. Its what governments do, but this is just a very very poor move. And business will not be able to engage people under the current model because people simply won't work under that model anymore. That will then force the relationship to be much more b2b which perhaps is a good thing. But employees we are not, and we also aren't treated like them, some places do but only fools work there.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
