From 1 January 2025, the Tax and Customs Administration will again fully enforce the qualification of labour relations. In the Enforcement Plan for Labour Relations 2025, the Tax and Customs Administration indicates how this enforcement will be shaped and the consequences of the lifting of the enforcement moratorium from 1 January 2025. In doing so, the Tax and Customs Administration pays attention to a 'soft landing'. What is that?
Soft landing
From 1 January 2025, retrospective payroll taxes can again be imposed. This can only be done retroactively until 1 January 2025. This means that effectively a growth model applies until 2030. Only in 2030 can the Tax Authorities again impose correction obligations and additional tax assessments up to 5 years back. With regard to the period before 1 January 2025, the Tax and Customs Administration - with due observance of the five-year period - can only impose corrections if there is malicious intent or if a previously issued instruction has not been sufficiently followed. In its enforcement, the Tax and Customs Administration has room for customisation and an eye for the human dimension. The soft landing is shaped, inter alia, by the measures below.
In 2025, risk-oriented supervision of false self-employment will start with a company visit. During a company visit, the inspector will discuss the hiring of self-employed workers. At this stage, it has not yet been established whether false self-employment actually exists. If necessary, the client is informed that he is expected to prevent pseudo self-employment in his organisation. This gives an entrepreneur the opportunity to improve his business operations. This can be done in various ways. An entrepreneur may choose to employ false self-employed workers. It could also be that a change in the way the assignment is carried out results in the assignment actually being carried out by a self-employed person. In this way, the client is alerted.
In a few cases, false self-employment may be directly addressed through an audit, for example in case of concrete risk signals indicating evident false self-employment or if false self-employment is detected by the inspector during an audit of another taxable item, for example VAT. The inspector may start an audit if it is estimated that there are high risks of false self-employment and the risk that the client continues to work with false self-employed persons. The inspector can focus the audit on the most recent periods so that the financial risk is initially limited. In case of a finding of non-compliance with tax rules, additional payroll taxes can then be imposed, but no further back than 1 January 2025. In this way, entrepreneurs are given room to get it right and comply with laws and regulations.
Furthermore, the Inland Revenue will not impose fines in the first year (2025). This applies to both default fines and penalty fines.
All approved model agreements will remain in force until the end of 2029. In practice, if work is done as set out in the model agreement, clients can be confident that they will not owe payroll taxes.
Note: The aim is to normalise enforcement on qualification of employment relationships. This means that from 1 January 2026, enforcement on the qualification of the employment relationship will be reshaped within the regular enforcement plans and will again take place as for all other tax resources.
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