HMRC's IR35 CEST tool leaves over 200k workers ‘in limbo’

Data published by HMRC show that the tax authority’s IR35 status checker tool determined that 210,000 workers were labelled as ‘undetermined’ when figuring out their employment status

On June 24 2021 HMRC released usage data for Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) the data released showed that CEST was used over 1.6m times from November 2019 to 31 May 2021.

In this, 1m workers were identified as providing services through an intermediary between the same period, and in around half of these cases, 499,974, were classified as being outside IR35 with 308,176 being categorised as inside.

The data released by the government authority showed that the usage of CEST increased tenfold ahead of the original April 2020 rollout date of the IR35 reforms to the private sector, with 233,748 and 229,177 instances of usage during February 2020 and March 2020.

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