Do You Have Independent Contractors in Your Practice?
Chiropractic practices must navigate worker classification carefully, as it’s crucial to follow IRS guidelines and procedures to avoid penalties and back-paying taxes, wages, work comp, and unemployment insurance.
Referenced Links:
Video Series:
1) Are Your Workers Employees or Independent Contractors?
2) Should Your Physician Workers Classify As Employees?
3) Behavioral Controls – IRS Worker Classification
4) Worker Classification: Financial Control and Relationship
5) Worker Classification – Delegation, Kickbacks, Fraud
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Article:
Independent Contractor Or Employee
Transcript:
We want to touch base in regards to independent contractor versus employees, the potential problems, and the challenges that result. We’re getting phone calls and we’re watching conversations in the chiropractic world right now, from both workers and employers, where there may be some misclassification problems and challenges. In fact, what I would tell you is, if you have an independent contractor in your practice, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the videos we’re going to, I’m going to include some links down below, as well as a detailed article regarding the IRS tests that you want to make sure that you are meeting all of the IRS guidelines to properly classify them.
If you’ve misclassified a worker, there are a number of problems that come with that, most of them financial, and so you want to make sure that you get it right, either there are penalties for not having the appropriate forms W2 and I-9s for employees, you can be charged against their overall wages for not withholding the taxes, you’re going to have to pay a decent portion of the employee misclassified independent contractors, a FICA wages, as well as all of the FICA wages that you would have been responsible for FICA taxes that you would have been responsible for, as an employer, if you will, you’re gonna have to pay a portion of interest related to those unpaid tax payments, there’s a work comp penalty, and there’s an unemployment tax or unemployment insurance tax penalty that also typically has to be paid in those particular situations. And here’s the thing, once a misclassification has been identified, all of those different agencies, both federal and state, they begin to communicate with each other to ensure that all of these different items are taken care of, this isn’t an area that you want to take lightly, you want to make sure that you get it right. So down below. Again, I’m going to include a series of different videos related to the proper classification of employees. Additionally, I’m going to add a link to a really great article that can walk you through to ensure that you’re getting it right. I encourage you to do this. This is you know, a lot of times it’s complaint driven, it can be audit driven, all kinds of ways that ultimately misclassifications can be identified. And so you want to make sure that you get it right. We’ll catch you next week.
