From DentistryIQ —
Sometimes, classifying employees for your practice is easy. If you hire someone to open the office and greet patients from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., you have an employee. However, if you hire a bookkeeper to prepare your corporate tax return, you’re using an independent contractor.
In the past, dental practices frequently hired dental assistants, dental hygienists, and associate doctors and classified them as independent contractors. If the new person didn’t fit into the practice, termination was quick and easy. There were no human resource issues, and there was no risk of increasing your unemployment rate. Unfortunately, this is against the law.
Reclassification of employees has become commonplace in many business sectors as a way to reduce costs. While some dental offices are ignorant of their classification errors, others are deliberate in their actions. Additional employees mean higher taxes and additional worker’s compensation insurance. Additional employees also mean paying more into the unemployment system. For companies with high turnover, regularly losing employees increases the cost of unemployment.
Read the full story at Dental office worker misclassification
