In the U.S. at least, you are still legally required to report the legal identity of any contractor to the IRS and must ask them to fill out an I-9 form: https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/complete-and-correct-form-...

Any contractor making >= $600 have to fill the payment and they receive a 1099.

There are very few exceptions to that and they are listed in the article.

(not from the article) but from a quick google search...

"businesses that contract with S Corps do not need to issue them a Form 1099-MISC"

I'm an s-corp, and yet I still have people 1099ing me. It's more annoying than anything because I get all my tax stuff done quickly, and someone will send out a late 1099 with slightly different numbers (typically error on their end) and... I've just given up caring about that.

"You don't send 1099s to your landscaping service, or your office supply store purchases, or the energy company, but you've contracted services with them." "Oh, but you're a person"... with an s-corp registered for 10+ years and a separate employer TIN.

You are required to solicit the taxpayer identification of anyone for whom you are required to file a 1099-NEC form--this is normally done on Form W-9.

If the contractor fails to furnish a TIN, you are not required to cease business with them, however you will likely have to respond to the IRS and show that they refused to tell you when you file the 1099s each year.

The IRS can assess a $50 civil penalty against the contractor (doubt they bother due to low amount set in statute), but more importantly the employer must withhold 30% backup withholding due to the failure to provide TIN. The employer will have to report the income and withholding on their tax return, which will likely be held up while the IRS verifies the match.

I-9/E-Verify is for employees of your entity only and is not completed for independent contractors, nor for temp/contract labor who is employed by a different company (they do the form).

Half of what you said supports the comment you're replying to, and half of it is irrelevant.

The part about I-9 compliance directly contradicts the parent comment which stated, "any contractor . . . and must ask them to fill out an I-9 form."

The part about the 1099 reporting does agree with the parent comment, however, added some additional context about what happens if the contractor refuses and what exactly the business's responsibility is, which I thought was relevant to this discussion.

Thats interesting. I have contracted with multiple entities in the US for many years and they never asked for anything like that.

I think what they meant to say is the legal entity, rather than identity; a LLC or other business formation should suffice for most reporting requirements. There may be some exceptions in some areas, but I've contracted with with thousands of entities and never once had to verify the identity of their employees unless it was for individual access (passes/badges, etc.).

So basically any real job?

If you are located outside of the USA then they are not required to gather this info.

However if they believe you are a USA citizen or reside in the USA while doing the work, then they are supposed to.

"Oh say, can you see ... Land of the free"

How ridiculous is this? Do you really have a right to free association if you have to file a report if you pay someone $600 to do something for you?

> Do you really have a right to free association if you have to file a report if you pay someone $600 to do something for you?

Yes, you do.

How much is that worth if you aren't legally allowed to give anyone any money?

No rights are absolute, they all have limitations when they impede on other rights. A history of unfair labor practices has established a precedent of limitations on "free association." Even the right to life has limitations in the US, if a judge finds you sufficiently heinous.

I'm not trying to advocate for some absolute freedom of action here. I'm saying it is, in my view, unreasonable that anyone who pays someone else a grand to do something suddenly has an obligation to report that to the government.

To me, it seems excessive, and incompatible with the principles of a generally free society. I'm not convinced that any history of unfair labor practice justifies such reporting obligations, which imply some obligation to refuse to accept payment in exchange for performing some perfectly legal work. It seems to be that the purpose of this requirement is the convenience of enforcement of tax compliance and nothing more.

> I'm saying it is, in my view, unreasonable that anyone who pays someone else a grand to do something suddenly has an obligation to report that to the government.

Anyone doesn't have to do this; businesses have to do this, and only for certain kinds of services and business relationships with individuals or partnerships. (e.g., my publisher has to send a 1099 to me, one of their authors, but doesn't need to send a 1099 to Ingram, their printing company.)

> It seems to be that the purpose of this requirement is the convenience of enforcement of tax compliance

I don't think anyone's made any (plausible) claim that any IRS reporting requirement is somehow related to the history of unfair labor practice? The IRS is interested in finding out how much tax they're owed; it's not like they're being provided the data to make some kind of judgement about whether contractors are being paid fairly.

I have a lot of people I associate with that I've never paid >$600 to do labor for me.

Being able to associate != hiring someone for a job

If you need to pay your friends >$600 to hang out with you, you should probably re-evaluate your life.

I'm not suggesting it's necessary to pay any person you associate with. It just seems a really intrusive restriction to legally report on anyone you pay.

To me, it seems as absurd as having to file a report with the government on anyone you meet. I can see justification in narrow cases, but requiring it universally seems ridiculous to me.

> you really have a right to free association if you have to file a report if you pay someone $600 to do something for you?

> I'm not suggesting it's necessary to pay any person you associate with.

So you agree the right to free association is orthogonal to the idea of hiring people to do a paid job then, right? In which case, how is having labor hiring laws a violation of free association, when you agree you can still freely associate with people? In which case, arguing "free association" in terms of arguing that labor hiring laws being unjust isn't really a valid argument then, huh?

Like, I can go down to a park with a group of friends and not have to tell the government about it. I can attend a church and practice and not have to tell the government about it. I can have a dinner party at my home with my friends and not have to tell the government about it. I can freely associate with whoever I want, that's not a crime.

I can't hire a bunch of people who are not legally allowed to work in this country, as currently the government wants to disincentive unrestricted immigration and have made this action of paying people for labor they deem improper illegal. This is an immigration policy, not a free association policy. FWIW, I'm one to argue we should relax some hiring practices and reduce barriers to immigration in many ways, but this really isn't a "free association" kind of issue.

You can even give hundreds or thousands of dollars to people as gifts without reporting requirements.

The requirements kick in when people are trying to avoid paying social security tax, basically, or paying for work under the table.

In the US and comparable jurisdictions, the concept of employee and contractor are not interchangeable and imply differences in things like autonomy and expectations. This is as much to make sure that workers have appropriate protections and that contractors have appropriate freedom as it is about tax reporting or whatever.

Far more likely is that these companies aren't well-footed legally and don't realize that they'll only be able to stay under the radar while small. Which is common, but puts a cap on how high-profile they can grow. They'll need to sort things out before they can scale or get involved in regulated industries.

It's highly debatable and jurisdiction dependant.

Plenty of contractors are basically employees paying less taxes and not having holidays.

(not that I'm complaining, I'm glad there is a legal way to minimise how much the government steals from me)

States are a bit trickier because healthcare is so ridiculously overpriced and therefore people value health insurance provided by an employer. I never even bothered to sign up for the private health insurance I had in the UK and just either user the crappy public one or paid out of pocket, finding the best doctor for the job (instead of what my insurance would have offered).

It's not an arbitrary choice whether to treat a particular interaction as an employee or as a contractor - the nuances are a bit tricky, but in general it's prohibited to treat it as contracting if it isn't actual contracting but if someone is working what we'd call a standard full time job at a company.

The obvious way (mentioned elsewhere here) is that you can reasonably provide services as a business - non-anonymously, non-pseudonymously, disclosing the exact legal identity of your shell company instead of your personal details.

> It's not an arbitrary choice whether to treat a particular interaction as an employee or as a contractor - the nuances are a bit tricky, but in general it's prohibited to treat it as contracting if it isn't actual contracting but if someone is working what we'd call a standard full time job at a company.

Yea, but I suspect these are all going to be remote jobs with people in other countries at which point they're all contractors. It's only people in the same country as the company since generally the thing they're trying to avoid is tax evasion and they don't care if they can't tax you.

Just to underline non-anonymously: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/02/04/the-end-of-the-an...

Owners can no longer hide their identity with a shell company after a recent law.

In Europe you'd get issues with accounting, both in terms of figuring out value added tax, in terms of your local tax authority asking uncomfortable questions why you have expenses without valid invoices (and yes, an invoice has to show who is invoicing). The first probably isn't an issue in the US, I'm not sure about the second.

You could try to set up a company to hide your identity, but how well that works depends on the jurisdiction (in many places it's trivial to figure out the director of a company).