Get Prepared: Putting Together a Compliant IR35 Business Plan

There are a number of key stages that you need to put in place to create a compliant IR35 plan for your business.

1. Educate: Find out how IR35 is going to affect your business. Make sure you understand what is changing and what HMRC expects your business to have in place by April 2020.

2. Form a group: Form a group of decision makers, a committee, from around your business who will ensure you end up with a workable, low risk, solution. This group should consist of representatives from around your business such as:
  • Senior management
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Procurement
  • HR
  • Recruitment
  • IT
  • Legal/compliance
This group should be responsible for setting a timeline, scoping out the scale of the project, listing tasks needed and assigning responsibilities to ensure completion of project.

3. Assess your suppliers: You must ensure that your whole recruitment supply chain is compliant. Make sure you understand each supplier’s process to ensure you are not open to risk. It could be worth investigating MSP solutions to simplify this process.

4. Assess your workforce: One of the most important stages in preparing for IR35 is the assessment of your workforce and whether they fall inside or outside of the scope of IR35.

It is vital that you use ‘reasonable care’ to decide if your off-payroll workers are inside or outside of IR35 scope.


Once you understand the full scope of your workforce, you can start to work out what changes you may need to make to your recruitment budget, suppliers and systems.

5. Process: Implement a compliant process that will stand up to HMRC. The sooner you start to communicate your new process, and the simpler you keep it, the better engaged your contractors will remain.

Risks to avoid

Summary questions on getting prepared

The summary of this preparation comes down to two broad questions.

What do I need to do? As an end-user you must take ‘reasonable care’ in assessing your whole contracting workforce, documenting your assessment clearly.

How long have I got to prepare? Time is of the essence. If you haven’t already you must take the first steps towards organising your workforce assessment.

The timeline below gives you a realistic timeline to implementing a new IR35 solution.

Hover over the icons to find out where you should aim to be up to so you are ready to launch your plan before April 2020.


DOWNLOAD FREE BROCHURE: For more information on getting prepared, download our free brochure by filling in your details in the form to your left.

If you would like help implementing an IR35 plan, check out our compliant solutions here.

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Are you ready to get prepared for IR35? Get the ball rolling and contact our team for a free 1hr consultation to assess your needs.

Call Client Development Director, Lewis Trow on 01925 907020 or email lewis.trow@firstrg.com

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