umbrella company altering contract to avoid notice payment

[original PM]

Yep all seems about right to me.

You will be paid on a min wage plus bonus based on invoice value.

What the brolly should try to do is sue the agency for the breach of contract and obtain full payment for the 3 weeks you have not been paid at the contracted hours - they should then pass this payment on to you.

Reality is they will not sue agency as it will remove the chance of the agency passing further referrals to them.

Likewise Agency should sue client for brach of contract but will not for the above reasons.

They tried to con you first time round with the initial cannot pay you and changing contract routine (not uncommon but shame on the brolly for being money grabbing b'stards).

Interstingly enough if you have any outstanding scheudle e expenses they will not be able to include these in your final payment as if they did it would reduce your taxable pay to below the NMW threshold.

unfortunately you are royally shafted - but go get another contract and then you will be earning from that one and also getting paid min wage for the 3 weeks you did not work --- every cloud has a silver lining etc!!!

As an unfortunate quirk of fate if you do get another contract they will then be able to take into account any outstanding scheudle e expenses so it is best to stay with that brolly!

[ASB]

Thanks

So, if I have understood correctly, if my business has a number of associates who do work when needed, and those associates use a brolly, there is no risk of them being deemed an employee of my business if my business pay invoices issued by the brolly.

The word "deemed" seems to come up far too often these days for things to be obvious and based on common sense.

I would hesitate to use the words "no risk". There is always some. But it is likely very low. You give no details of how the associates operate and how the brolly in question operate, but there has only been one case I am where a worker party has been found to be an actual employee of an end user in this sort of arrangement - and that had some very specific weird circumstances.

[original PM]

As for brollies, if someone actually wants to be an employee, why not just be an employee of the Agent on their payroll, or an employee of the end client on their payroll. The concept of a brolly just feels like the addition of another superflous intermediary in the supply chain, which does add much value beyond being an outsourced payroll service.

Well the method the brolly uses for paying you means that you can offset some of your expenses (mileage subsistence etc) against tax thus meaning you do not get taxed on the full value of the invoice.

So you earn more money

Not overly difficult to see what value they add.

And as for the below

The whole idea of things being one way for one purpose, and deemed to be something else for other purpose is really confusing. Kind of reminds me of operator overloading where someone could decided to change the meaning of the Plus sign, so that 10+5 could quite happily become 2 under specific conditions and 15 under others.

What are you talking about fool!

[DiscoStu]

Will you be naming and shaming once this matter is concluded?

[BA to the Stars]

They are a "big" umbrella company, who many will know and love.

Big - other words to describe big - large, huge, giant, hmmmmm

[TykeMerc]

I worked though a "big" umbrella for a while, binned them after they messed up basic admin and pay repeatedly.

Not sure how the OP will fare with the case, but it does have a destinctly dodgy ring to it.