IfA Now have a policy on Self Employment

[Marcus Brody]

So called SE –either they are or they are not.

I think Kevin's point may be relating to the companies that designate the people on site as 'self-employed' to avoid having to deal with their tax and national insurance issues - basically, even though these people are effectively treated as staff of the company, it tries to get around any tax and employment responsibilities by saying to them 'you're self employed, you need to deal with all that stuff yourself'. This is an entirely different situation from true self-employed status, as so eloquently argued by your good self, in that the people involved may not actually want to be self-employed, and may not meet the Revenue's measure of what constitutes being self-employed. On this interpretation of Kevin's comments, it would be the company that call its staff self-employed that would be perpetrating tax fraud, rather than the 'self-employed' archaeologist. I didn't take Kevin's comments to be having a go at true self-employed archaeologists, rather it's a criticism of companies that force it's employees into a situation where they have all the responsibilities and drawbacks of being self-employed (responsibility for own tax and national insurance, no sick or holiday pay etc) without any of the benefits (freedom to set own work programme, charge rates etc).