warning: agent strategy with extra contract terms on a separate sheet of paper

[sunflower]

Your 'gentlemen's agreement' sounds bad but where you want to amend/remove terms from the standard set of terms, it is more common for these amendments to be stated in the separate Schedule of Assignment.

Saves the agent rewriting their standard terms and still part of the contractual agreement between you and agency.

Interesting, thanks for the tip

[captainham]

Your 'gentlemen's agreement' sounds bad but where you want to amend/remove terms from the standard set of terms, it is more common for these amendments to be stated in the separate Schedule of Assignment.

Saves the agent rewriting their standard terms and still part of the contractual agreement between you and agency.

[northernladuk]

You do know you missed the first of April?

[sunflower]

Word of warning.

I was not happy with some terms and conditions in a contract from an agency. Went far beyond normal business risks. They came out with the usual arguments, eg these are the client's terms and cannot be changed.

For one of the deal breaker issues, they said they had a gentleman's agreement from the client and could put this in writing on a separate sheet and get it signed by them and the client, supposedly to make the main contract sound really risky and stand more chance of falling outside IR35 for my benefit. The tax inspectors would only read the main contract, not the gentleman's agreement on a separate sheet... :-)

I took legal advice on the contract clauses and could smell a major rat with this separate gentleman's agreement... The commercial lawyer said this: for all terms and conditions to be valid for a particular gig, all the terms have to be in the same contract. Separate attachments or appendices do not stand up in court. It can be extremely hard to proove that they were ever part of an original project contract.

Don't let agents pull the wool over your eyes. The lawyer said it's typical of big agencies which might try to bulldoze you.

I'd alraedy managed to pick up that, despite the agent saying the contract fell outside of IR35, other clauses they put in were full of direction and control issues thanks to having read a lot of usefull info on the forums here. They seem to think right of substitution makes a contract automatically IR35 proof. This country needs a new City & Guilds Qualification or GCSE for tax and contract law which all agents have to sit before starting work. It just wastes time when contractors have to play contract ping pong to sort it out.

Lots of companies out there are probably unaware that agents with unreasonable contract terms are costing them project resources when contractors just choose to go to another project where contract terms can be negotiated to satisfy all parties.