4. Trends and Specific Cases
a. New or Expected Developments
Due to recent changes in the fiscal regime of IT employees and the fact that their activity is suited to be subject to service providing agreements, a greater number of IT professionals agree to act as independent contractors. In most cases they retain the flexibility of providing the services to other beneficiaries and they are able to maintain contractual relationships with more beneficiaries than it would have been possible as an employee, due to the rule stating that work shedules for different employment agreements cannot overlap.
The fact that the fiscal regime for both employees and independent contractors is similar, while employees enjoy more protective rights, especially regarding the protection against unfair dismissal were factors in an increase of individuals seeking to obtain employee status for the activity they perform.
One common practice in Romania is as described above the temporary use of employees of a temporary work agent in order to provide services to another company than the employer, meaning that the employer hires a number of individuals with specific qualifications that are assigned to provide services to other companies. In this case the individuals are always employees and not individual contractors, being subordinated to their employer (the temporary work agency) and not to the company that they are providing their service for. This is common practice as companies try to avoid paying higher wages to their own employees, by contracting services at lower rates than the combined wages that they would have paid if they had used the employed force. The employees used in providing the services to the company are paid by their employer lower wages than the employees of the company they are performing services for.
b. Recent Amendments to the Law
The legislation regarding the distinction between dependent and independent activities and on the employment relationship have prove to be stable during the recent years. The only important changes are the ones that were made regarding the fiscal treatment applied to specific categories of individuals or professionals.
