[asterisk-biz] OT: Paying people in faraway (Western) places.

[Alex Balashov]

Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 19:42 -0500, Alex Balashov wrote:
>> The problem is, I don't want to become an "international businessman" - 
>> I have neither the resources nor the business case nor the capital for 
>> it.  This UK deal is most likely a one-off;  I'm not planning on hiring 
>> others in the UK per se, nor am I expecting to hire many others in 
>> non-US countries.
>>
> oh in that case there are exceptions for seasonal and low income workers
> (quarterly and annual caps for that).  Depending on how much it is that
> could make it all ok to pay from the US side, and generally on them to
> remit to the UK authorities since you cant do the PAYE stuff.  
> 
> The problem is that its like $600/year or $200/quarter or something
> silly like that.

Yeah, that's not going to work.  This is the UK we're talking about, and 
a full-time salaried position;  the plan wasn't to pay him beans.

I do have strong objections to paying taxes on non-cash income, but I 
somehow doubt he's going to take payment in beers.  :-)

So, I guess I won't be hiring my UK guy:

1. He is perfectly qualified for a fabulous range of UK IT jobs;  what 
on Earth could possibly motivate him to register and form a company to 
operate out of, or deal with the complexities of remanding taxes himself 
to UK authorities?  There is no incentive.  I'm offering to pay him 
decently by market standards, but not _that_ degree of recently.

2. I have neither the money nor the time to waste setting up a UK 
company for the purpose of hiring a single employee, and dealing with 
the attendant regulatory and taxation issues.

3. Likewise for various off-shore/tax-haven holding options.  Even 
setting aside the fact that it can be costly and, as Nitzan pointed out, 
is shady and a red flag for audits and tax evasion investigations, above 
all else I simply don't have time to deal with this crap.

No incentive.  No business case.

4. As mentioned in another post, staffing / contract firms will price 
him way out of my range.  Absolutely not.

...

It seems like the only option possibly worth investigating is getting an 
established company in the UK to employ him for the exclusive purpose of 
contracting him out to me, even though he has no other business utility 
whatsoever and may in fact not have any conceptual relation to their 
business activity.

Or, perhaps there is an alternative contract firm over there that really 
does just charge overhead for this nonsense.  If anyone wants to give 
any pointers on finding one, I'm all ears.  Hell, if you operate in the 
UK and want to employ and resell this guy to me at a small margin, my 
inbox would love to hear from you.

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The problem is that the conventional options are the same kinds of 
recruiter/IT staffing/project resource parasites that subsist everywhere 
else, and they somehow think they're entitled to a 100-300% hourly 
margin just for providing a warm body to me.  I didn't even ask them to 
go find him;  I recruited him myself.  That's absolutely not acceptable, 
and it wouldn't be acceptable even if they did recruit him themselves, 
because in that case, a few thousand dollars' commission is the most 
they could possibly be entitled to, not a yearly recurring gross margin 
equal to or greater than the guy's salary, which is what these assclowns 
all want.  I will never do business with "body shops."

Contrary to their allegations that they provide any sort of "project 
management" or otherwise "intelligent" staffing solutions, they are 
envelopssolely in the business of reselling individual employees.  I can 
see how that might be a service worth paying a commission for if the did 
it well (which they don't), but that's not the model under which most of 
them are operating anymore.  Instead, they want to pay a guy $35/hr and 
bill him out to me at $80-$150/hr, and, actually, if they could convince 
me to darken my skies with even more people.  They don't provide enough 
value to warrant a 10% margin, let alone a 200% one.  I sincerely hope a 
huge plague of locusts swarms down and destroys all these dipshits 
biblical prophecy style.

I don't understand why corporate America continues to allow their 
business models to be sustainable;  why on earth would someone pay 
200-300% more for nothing?  Yes, I understand there's an opportunity 
benefit they have to pay a premium for in that those employees are not 
permanent but theoretically provided to staff particular ongoing 
"projects," nor are paid benefits, etc, etc., but that can't possibly be 
worth paying $50/hr on top of every $40/hr someone makes.

And don't even get me started on Infosys, Wipro, Tata, Tech Mahindra, etc.

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-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775