In October 2017 I commenced working for a West Midlands NHS Trust via a contract agreed with their chosen agency. The contract was advertised at £350 per day and was said to be outside of IR35.
On inspection of the contract there were to be six payments over a six month period which represented milestones in the work that had been agreed (a project to overhaul their computer network).
The total amount to be paid was equal to the £350p/d, multiplied by the work days in the six month period and were differing in amounts, thus ensuring that the contractor was not in any way ‘employed’ by this public sector organisation.
The first two months/milestones were paid as per the contract. However, with the appointment of a new manager who insisted on extra work being undertaken whilst assuring me that he would sort the finances out to ensure payment, things came to a head after three further months without pay.
We parted on bad terms with the trust (still) owing my company close to £30,000.
The point to my story is that the trust clearly needed to ‘get around’ IR35 to attract a contractor with the ability to undertake the work required.
I still see fresh advertisements for a network engineer which is easily identifiable as being this agency/trust showing that some work still needs to be carried out.
If only the government hadn’t forced IR35 upon them, it’s likely that all the work required to put this trusts computer systems into a more stable (and safer for their patients) condition will have been accomplished.
This is written in connection to the article ‘IR35 HMRC Exemption‘ and ‘IR35 Ministry of Justice Exemption‘.
This is written by an anonymous contractor and represent the views of the author and therefor do not represent the views of the publicist.
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If your contract was with an agency, then they are responsible for paying your fees. It does frustrate me when agencies are happy to take a cut, but don’t step up when their client won’t pay. Best to agree before a contract of this type that the agency is responsible for collecting payment from the end customer. If they refuse, ask them what their fee is for. If they still refuse, walk away and seek alternate contracts
I was approached on one of these risk and reward contracts. This client wants to pay lousy day rates, protect its butt against IR35 and ensure contractors deliver when they are a key dependency/ constraint. This can never be inside IR35 as no employee works on such a basis
Working for 3 months without getting any money is a bit silly. 6 weeks maybe (30 days + 2 weeks), but beyond that is a joke.