We certainly can, but we often find it’s more beneficial to businesses to have a wider conversation with us about IR35 and what their concerns are around non-compliance. As well as profiling risk with their contingent labour, we can also work with them to audit their supply chain, to ensure both status determinations are accurate and correctly passed down and applied within the supply chain.
IR35 Risk Profiling
Understanding your contingent worker landscape
Hiring contingent labour allows your business to be flexible with its workforce, bringing in experts when needed or scaling up operations to deliver projects. It’s important to have an understanding of how Personal Service Companies operate within business however, and whether enough checks are in the place to ensure compliance with the IR35 off-payroll working rules.
That’s exactly what our labour risk profiling service is designed for, taking a comprehensive review into working practices, and understanding how employment status indicators have been perceived when making Status Determination Statements. Critically, it’s about understanding the current risk within your off-payroll operations and identifying improvements that can be made to maintain compliance.
Identifying potential risks associated with your contingent labour pool
At Linx, we partner closely with your business to deliver a thorough risk profiling service tailored to your Personal Service Company (PSC) contingent workforce.
We start by analysing your existing Status Determination Statements (SDS) to understand the process behind how they are assessed. Our team check:
- The SDS process follows HMRC’s employment status indicators
- Assessments reflect actual working practices, not just contract terms
- Arrangements truly indicate off-payroll working requirements
- Whether blanket determinations may have been used, or a role-based assessment took place
By scrutinising your SDS process, we help you demonstrate reasonable care and reduce the risk of HMRC challenges.
We’ll assess the criticality of the resource – how essential each contingent worker is to your operations or project outcomes. If a PSC worker is critical to business continuity, embedded in strategic delivery, or irreplaceable, this may suggest they are functioning more like an employee than an independent supplier.
Scrutinising in and out of scope determinations
Our IR35 contingent labour risk profiling service includes an assessment of how you classify engagements as in or out of scope for IR35. We:
- Examine the criteria used for each determination
- Ensure consistent application across all engagements
- Identify any blanket decisions or gaps in evidence that could raise red flags with HMRC
This helps you build a robust, auditable process for status determinations, reducing the likelihood of non-compliance.
Supporting your business with IR35
Beyond contingent labour risk profiling, we’re able to provide dedicated IR35 support services to our clients, helping them to remain compliant.
process reviews
Reviewing your IR35 procedures to ensure they align with HMRC guidance and are sufficiently robust to meet off-payroll working regulations.
staff training
Helping to protect your business with specialist IR35 staff training, personalised to your needs and focused on accurate, compliant contingent worker management.
Supply chain audits
Conducting a thorough review of your supply chain helps ensure IR35 compliance, assess working practices, and verify that recruitment partners meet your legal obligations.
Looking for patterns of non-compliance
Contract duration and engagement history can be key indicators of employment status. That’s why our team will review the length and renewal patterns of your contingent workers, and whether contracts are for specific projects or ongoing roles. A separate Status Determination Statement is needed for each assignment a contingent worker is engaged for, which may vary in length; these need to take into account the working practices however to ensure there have been no fundamental changes. Rolling over arrangements or deploying contingent workers to support a second project not detailed in their original terms of engagement, is not permitted under off-payroll working rules without a new determination.
By flagging contracts or engagement types that may increase IR35 risk, we help you take proactive steps to address potential issues before they escalate.
Evaluating working practices for IR35 compliance
We go beyond the paperwork to understand how your contingent workers operate day-to-day.
We review:
- Levels of supervision, direction and control
- Whether PSC workers have genuine autonomy over how work is delivered
- The reality of substitution rights and mutuality of obligation
- How their engagement differs from directly employed staff
This practical insight ensures that your determinations are grounded in reality, not just theory, and helps you identify any discrepancies between contracts and actual working arrangements.
Actionable insights and key recommendations
After profiling your contingent labour pool, we’ll deliver a clear risk report with practical recommendations. This will highlight areas where working practices and contingent labour arrangements indicate a degree of risk to your business. We’ll identify gaps and inconsistencies, and steps we’d suggest to strengthen your compliance and protect your business. With Linx, you gain a clear, actionable roadmap for managing IR35 risk across your contingent workforce.
Frequently asked questions
about contingent labour risk profiling
Does Linx offer their IR35 contingent labour risk profiling solution as a stand-alone service?
Will the IR35 contingent labour risk profiling service help check status determinations have been made correctly?
We typically don’t focus on individual Status Determination Statements, although we can build this into our service upon request, instead we focus on identifying potential risk within the contingent labour pool. This could be the lengths of engagements, the number of role-based determinations being made, how consistently processes have been applied between decision makers and whether there are out of scope determinations that may be considered in scope upon HMRC investigation.
How long does the risk profiling exercise take?
This depends on how large your contingent labour pool is and how many Personal Service Companies support your business. Where your business operates through different divisions or business units, we’ll also need to review the consistency of determinations across these before we can provide an informative report identifying potential risk. We’ll discuss all of this with you during our discovery sessions, so you’ll have clear timescales.
How much does it cost to profile our contingent labour pool?
We don’t offer an off the shelf solution, and pricing is determined based on how many contingent workers we need to profile amongst other factors. Once we’ve had an initial discussion on how your business operates, we’ll be able to provide more clarity on pricing.
What are the benefits of undertaking a contingent labour risk profiling exercise?
Businesses find they gain greater visibility of decisions being made in their contingent worker labour pool, which you don’t often have when looking at individual status determinations. It allows you to understand the breakdown of Personal Service Companies within your business and identify any potential risks to IR35 non-compliance that you can proactively mitigate. It can also help to identify where formal changes are needed to internal processes and those you share with your supply chain.
REQUEST A CALLBACK
If you’d like to initiate a conversation about how we can support your business with IR35 compliance, then share your details below.