Hi all, I have a question I don’t quite know who to ask.
The story: we have a small (online) home business in Switzerland. We’d like to pay a contractor (ideally for 12 months, maybe longer), in a different country.
Are there any laws or things to be aware of with paying someone outside of the country? It would be a contract for work rather than a remote employee (we are not looking to hire anyone, just pay for a set amount of time to help on a project).
Anyone have any experience with this?
Is the contractor registered as a company/business? Just get him/her to invoice you then the contractor takes care of his/her own affairs in their home country.
i had a contractor for my small business also, within the EU. As @ShirleyNot said, if s/he is registered as a company / self-employed / business, it is not a problem; he will have to pay his own taxes, his own social security fees, etc.
Worth, nevertheless, having a simple one-pager contract, stating that s/he is a contractor, pointing out the nature of his/her services, and stating that there is no employer/employee servitudes, and hence s/he is responsible for all SS payments, local taxes etc.
Thanks all! Yes, the expectation is that the person is a registered entity paying their local social securities and taxes, etc. We would need them to include their tax id on the invoice, so should be covered from that end.
Is there a time limit to how long we could pay for someone’s services?
There is nothing special about it, it just a B2B contract.
It’s probably a decade or so since I did it. However one complication I hit was accounting for VAT. The guy was too small to be registered in his country, so filling out the Swiss VAT return was a PIA (VAT returns must line up with financial statements). But apart from that all was good.