Over 100,000 people have quit self-employment before stricter enforcement of rules

Many people are quitting self-employment in anticipation of the enforcement of false self-employment rules by the Dutch Tax Authority. More than 100,000 self-employed people have signed themselves out of the Chamber of Commerce (KVK) during the first nine months of the year. This is around a quarter more than in the same period last year, numbers provided by KVK show.

Assistant professor of employment law Niels van der Neut from the University of Amsterdam thinks that this increase is partly because the Tax Authority is going to begin checking and enforcing whether self-employed people are not being hired for work that should actually be performed by somebody in regular employment from January 1.

The announcement of the checks has led to unrest among employees and clients. Some companies apparently do not want to work with self-employed people at all anymore. The government has said that employers will not be fined next year, provided they can demonstrate that they are taking steps to combat false self-employment.

Some of the self-employed people who quit will seek refuge in employment or secondment agencies to get back to work, Van der Neut thinks. At the beginning of this month, the Vereniging van Detacheerders Nederland (VvDN), the main organization for secondment work in the Netherlands, said that they see opportunities in the changes.

But Van der Neut expects that the majority will become employed in the sector where the self-employed first worked as a self-employed person. “Using health care as an example: people are schooled and trained for that. If they can no longer be self-employed in their sector and there are no opportunities to become self-employed in another sector, there is really only one option left, and that is regular employment.”

Van der Neut believes that some workers have also started working as self-employed due to poor employer practices. Employers do need the extra workers and are, therefore, now trying to make employment more attractive with indefinite employment contracts and favorable and flexible conditions. "If they had done that a lot earlier, I wonder whether we would have had so many self-employed people."