Germany has really, really strong employee protection. Hard to fire, mandatory vacation, mandatory pensions, mandatory maternity and paternity leave, ect.
If you run a society like that, you immediately face a problem: people try to get around the employee protection measures by relying on the gig economy, by hiring freelancers or by starting small companies.
So, the German tax agency has the additional authority to crack down on that. If you work freelance or run your own company, you need to always have several customers. If your only customer is a single company, the tax agency argues that you aren't actually a freelancer/small company, you are a de-facto employee of that company, and the two of you are violating several laws and owe back-payment on several employee benefit systems. Also, that's fraud BTW, here's your case number.
>Germany has really, really strong employee protection. Hard to fire, mandatory vacation, mandatory pensions, mandatory maternity and paternity leave, ect.
All EU countries have these perks with some variations between them. Only the "hard to fire" part varies more.
If you run a society like that, you immediately face a problem: people try to get around the employee protection measures by relying on the gig economy, by hiring freelancers or by starting small companies.
So, the German tax agency has the additional authority to crack down on that. If you work freelance or run your own company, you need to always have several customers. If your only customer is a single company, the tax agency argues that you aren't actually a freelancer/small company, you are a de-facto employee of that company, and the two of you are violating several laws and owe back-payment on several employee benefit systems. Also, that's fraud BTW, here's your case number.