EXCLUSIVE: Julian Sansum (pictured), partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), will discuss the tax implications of the gig economy and flexible working models, as well as how employers can practically utilise these employment structures, at Employee Benefits Live 2017.
The session, titled ‘Managing policy and tax differences in global benefits’, will form part of the global reward conference stream on Wednesday 11 October.
In his session, Sansum will explore how both employers and employees are seeking to implement and engage in more flexible working models, as employers look to tailor their labour market to suit organisation demand and reduce costs while employees want control over their working hours as well as job security.
Sansum will highlight how flexible modes of working and the gig economy can have repercussions on the UK’s tax system, as income tax and national insurance are the two biggest contributors of tax, accounting for 25% and 18% of all tax respectively, according to Sansum. This is compared to corporate tax accounting for 6% of all tax.
Sansum will further investigate how these employment models could therefore work in practice, to suit employers, employees and the government. Additionally, Sansum will discuss how these working structures could be implemented to ensure that legalities are also met.
He said: “[Organisations] increasingly want to have flexible labour. As demand in particular areas increases or decreases, [employers] want to have the ability to flex the labour market, because it’s too expensive to keep everybody on the payroll on a full-time, permanent basis all of the time. Individuals want it because they often want to have control over their hours. So you can see there’s two bits pushing at this, and what’s been happening over the last few years is [organisations] have put together different ways of working with people and sometimes the people might be self-employed, sometimes they might come through a personal services [organisation], sometimes they might be employees and there’s different tax implications on each of those.
“The government can’t afford to have new ways of working that reduce the tax take because it’s such a big thing, so that then leads on to a whole debate around how the gig economy could work and how these employment models might work in practice.
“This increasingly flexibility is coming and [organisations] and individuals need to prepare and take control over how they are going to approach it rather than just sleepwalk into a problem.”
Employee Benefits Live 2017 will take place on Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 October at Olympia National, London.
