From Travel Weekly, Mark Pestronk provides guidance to travel agencies on how to mitigate the risks of misclassifying workers as independent contractors. I particularly liked Mark’s advice that you can reclassify independent contractors without affecting their independence. Many independent contractors want to be their own boss and are afraid that becoming an employee will limit their autonomy. But employees can be given a great deal of freedom and how someone is paid does not necessarily affect their level of autonomy. Mark also discusses some of the consequences of reclassifying workers. Mark writes:
[Y]ou can reclassify ICs without affecting their independence. They can still handle their own clientele as they wish (within limits) and your agreement with them can still provide that the clients are theirs.
The bigger adjustment is on your end: You need to start withholding taxes, follow the federal and state labor laws (including minimum wages) and provide W-2s instead of 1099s. Contrary to the belief of many agency owners, a person who is compensated entirely on commission can be an employee for all tax and labor law purposes.
With employees, the employer needs to kick in half of the Social Security and Medicare taxes that an IC would otherwise pay, so the transition actually saves the former IC some taxes. To compensate yourself for this hit, you would need to deduct 7.65% of the employee’s gross income each pay period.
Next, assuming that you do not want to convert your ICs to employees, the two biggest steps that you can take to ward off involuntary reclassification are to require each IC to set up his or her own corporation or limited liability company and to require each such entity to obtain a business license and, where applicable, Seller of Travel registration.
If you encounter resistance from your ICs, even after explaining the reasons for these steps, you can help lessen it by providing forms and instructions and even paying the filing fees, which can be as much as $300, depending on the state where the independent contractor lives.
At this point, sharp readers will be wondering how these formalities make a worker “really in business for himself or herself.” The answer is that they help make it appear that the IC is truly independent, and appearance counts.
In my experience, once an auditing government agency finds out that an ostensible IC has his or her own company and requisite licenses, the auditor desists, and the case is usually closed. I can’t guarantee that these steps will ward off every audit, but I can guarantee that they will help.
Read the full story at Agencies using independent contractors can avoid labor audits
