The 34square Status Determination Statement

With 34square, once you have performed your IR35 assessment and concluded the result, you will be prompted to generate an automatically compiled Status Determination Statement, with the following important attributes and steps:

  • You will eSign the document with your mouse on a 'signature pad'.
  • As per your obligations as set out by HMRC, you will be prompted to send the document to the worker and to the fee payer. This will be executed via email workflow.
  • Both parties will eSign to confirm receipt and then publish the document.
  • All parties will have pdf copies of the signed document lodged in their secure document library on this platform.
  • You will be prompted at an interval of your choosing when generating, either 6 months or 12 months, to review the working practices, re-perform the assessment and regenerate the Status Determination Statement. HMRC guidelines advise this review should be performed to ensure compliance.
  • The Status Determination Statement clearly explains and justifies the outcome. It also provides all of the questions and answers from the assessment and indicates the impact on the conclusion of those responses.

All of this is achieved in a few seconds and provides a robust, defensible and evidentiary record of your compliance. If you instead use HMRC's Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) platform, you will face the following risks and limitations:

  • CEST is not closely aligned with case law and so outcomes are not robust.
  • It very often generates an undetermined outcome, mainly because it does not ask the right questions in order to determine a robust conclusion.
  • It asks a number of questions that arguably aren't even relevant to IR35 status determination.
  • It does NOT generate a Status Determination Statement and cannot have names of parties or contracts referenced in it. Someone therefore needs to manually create a Status determination Statement separately.