Hope you had a GREAT 4th of July. It was Adept’s 23rd Birthday! One of the tasks we review each year is IC status, and Christy and I have started reviewing contracts with that in mind. We’re making some changes to our contracts and we’ll be asking each of you to “re-up.” We’re compiling a list of contract dates as well, so we can celebrate your anniversary date each year. We hope we’ll be together for a long, long time!
So let’s take a look at the IRS’s rules for Independent Contractors. There’s a lot of information out there and it changes all the time. Let’s start with some basics. You probably know that Common Law is the oldest kind of law, based on how things have been decided in the past. Civil law, on the other hand, is based on specifically enacted legislation. Common law is basically your “because we’ve ALWAYS done it that way” law. So the Common Law rules about IC status are behavioral rules, financial rules, and the type of relationship. Let’s be sure we’re all on the same page, starting with Behavioral Rules.
Common Law Rules
Behavioral: Does the company control or have the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job?
We try to base all our standards and guidelines and tips on what our clients want. It seemed to me that the best way to provide good service was to find out what the client wants, and use THAT as the basis for how we do things. Mind if I use a “husband example” to illustrate? I was married to a guy who wasn’t working for a while, and I was working full time at a hospital. One evening when I came home from work he was very frustrated with me. He complained that I wasn’t keeping the house clean. Now, since I was working full time, and he wasn’t working at all, I had some thoughts on this topic myself. But we had argued about it before, so I said “All right! What is it I’m not cleaning? Why don’t YOU go clean it? Show me what you want.” With much huffing and puffing and a lot of drama, he got a can of furniture spray and a dust rag, took everything off the coffee table which was a part of a collection from custom wood furniture , wiped it off, stacked everything back on the coffee table, and said “There! Why can’t you do that?” Silly me! I had been thinking about scrubbing floors and toilets, baseboards, laundry, dishes, pots and pans, changing the beds, washing the windows and the showers, and he was thinking–ABOUT THE COFFEE TABLE! So from then on, I did what my client wanted–I cleaned the coffee table each evening when I came home. Made my life SO MUCH EASIER! (smile)
But I had learned that in my role in hospital administration as well. In my last job, I had supervised 144+ women in the admitting department of an urban hospital. Some of them got to work early. When it came time for performance evaluations, they always figured that would count in their favor. But it doesn’t! If you’re supposed to be at work at 7 AM, you don’t get extra credit for coming in at 6:45. It just doesn’t work like that. There’s no room for extra credit points on a performance evaluation! So if they got there early, but were surly toward the patients, or had lots of errors in their admitting paperwork, or didn’t verify insurance correctly, they’d get a bad evaluation. And they’d look at me and say “But I get here early!” Right, but that’s not what we’re asking you to do! You only get credit for what we’re actually paying you to do–what you are being asked to do.
So I applied the same thinking to our clients. At one point, the AAMT (American Association for Medical Transcriptionists) staged a big campaign about eponyms–words named for the person who identified the disease or delineated the symptoms, like Down’s Syndrome, or Huntington’s Chorea or Barrett’s esophagus. The AAMT maintained that it wasn’t a syndrome that Mr. Down HAD, so it wasn’t Down’s Syndrome, it was Down Syndrome. It wasn’t Barrett’s esophagus, it was MY esophagus, and I had the disease that Dr. Barrett had isolated. So it was a Barrett esophagus. The problem was that clients HATED the idea. So it was great that the AAMT was trying to establish itself as an ultimate Word Manager, but it drove our clients crazy. We finally dropped it. After all, our clients PAID US!
In the same way, we try to base our product line, our formatting styles, and our document setups based on what our clients want. Full- or Right-Justification is supposed to be absolutely the hardest to read. The neatly lined up text makes it hard for your eye to keep its place. But clients ask for it CONSISTENTLY! They all ask for it. If we don’t do it, they send the document back and tell us it’s wrong. So we ask you to right justify all documents. Not because it’s “right” or what we like, but because it’s what our clients ask for!
We advertise to our clients that we use the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s in all the advertising we do, so we ask you to use the Chicago Manual of Style because we tell our clients we do! Most of our clients are well-educated people, and they know at least something about grammar! So they want to know why we make the decisions about punctuation that we make. I had one client come back, FURIOUS, because what we sent him was a “concordance” not an “index.” Who knew? A concordance is a list of frequently used terms in a document. An index is a systematic review and cataloguing of what the reader might be looking for in a particular document. So we’ve changed our advertising to say “concordance/index” for clarification. This gentleman was an academic and had written many books in his long career, so he knew the difference between a concordance and an index. The client knows what they want, and it’s our job to provide it to them.
I use M E McLaughlin, no periods. When I did a book review for the Oral History Review they asked me why I used no periods. It was actually a holdover from the old AAMT Book of Style. The OHR came back to me and said “It’s not in any style manual, and it’s certainly not in the Chicago Manual of Style, so we’re going to change it. They kept it as a personal preference, because I (their client) asked them to.
The best example I have for the Common Law Rules is WWARD? (What Would A Roofer Do) Smile. It’s a simple, easy comparison, and my brain seems to be completely full these days. When a roofer comes to your house, you don’t expect to have to tell him how to lay down shingles and how to attach them to your roof. But you WOULD expect him to follow the accepted conventions, and lay them horizontally, use roofer’s nails, and so on, right? You tell him whether you want a 7-year roof or a 25-year roof, right? Those are industry standards and you expect that all roofers are going to adhere to industry standards so you make sure your house look the way you want it to look, of course you can also improve this with other details, as glow in the dark pebbles decoration in the garden or new painting for all the house.
Our industry is changing fast. So what we try to do is talk to potential clients, find out what they want, and grab those jobs for you. We use the information we get from talking to all those people to create effective advertising that will attract more people like them. Based on what they want, we try to set standards, so we can advertise to the next group of people how we do things, and grab more jobs for you.
Make sense? I’m dying to hear what you think. More soon!
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