Who Can I Hire As A 1099 Contractor?
Warning: These pages are not intended as professional advice. They are presented “as is”, reader beware! Hiring employees is a big hassle for a sole proprietor who doesn’t really need permanent manpower, but does need help with various specialized tasks. For the main part, the government would prefer that freelancing didn’t exist because it makes the tax picture, especially collecting taxes from those freelancers, more complicated. So the IRS has a set of guidelines to try to keep businesses from hiring employees but treating them as independent contractors. The motivation is obvious. When I hire an independent contractor to do work for me, I pay them an hourly rate or a fixed price for the work, and write them a check. I don’t withhold any taxes, I don’t offer them any benefits, they do the job, get paid, and are gone. Most of the time, I don’t even have to issue them a 1099 because they earn less than $600 from me during the tax year doing freelance jobs like proofreading, graphic de
