Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

It is, because the situation would have not happened before the changes. Basically now, thanks to the legislation, the client has the power to force a legitimate business into employment. If you are not a skilled worker you don't have any position to bargain, so it's umbrella or nothing.

> it can't be normal for them to go after someone who honestly believed they'd been properly employed and had all of the deductions properly collected just because someone completely different has ripped off HMRC?

It is their default behaviour unfortunately. It is cheaper to go after the worker, as ultimately it is their personal tax and they have no money to defend themselves in court. "You should have chosen the umbrella more wisely or you should have taken the work elsewhere". This is even on their official guidance pages, that the worker is responsible for their tax even if someone up the chain pulls a scam.

> I'm surprised the agency seem to be walking away untouched though if they set up the deal and actively pushed your friend towards a dodgy umbrella employer.

You would have to prove that they knew the umbrella is going to pull the scam and that they acted in bad faith, which is probably not possible. Having a PSL is also legal and the worker could always have walked away. They could also ask if she has logged in to the HMRC portal to see if her tax was being paid etc. and that is her fault for not taking due dilligence.

> HMRC do make mistakes but do also want to get the right money from the right people so if something has gone wrong here it's worth following up.

That's not true. For instance, read about the Loan Charge scandal.

HMRC is pretending they are doing anything about it - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mini-umbrella-company-fraud - they post some examples there.

> HMRC has deregistered tens of thousands of mini umbrella companies who they believed were involved in one or both of the following: >exploiting the VAT Flat Rate scheme >exploiting Employment Allowance

That's just two things out of many they should be focusing on and imagine they have already "deregistered" _tens_of_thousands_ of mini umbrellas.

Add to that the government is not interested in any regulation of umbrellas and any concerns about IR35 are dismissed by both government and HMRC.

FTE 110, 118, 130, Consulting 140, 152, 158, 175, 187, 201 Databricks 230 + ~100k in RSUs

Broadly I would say if you feel underpaid for your skills go into consulting or join a startup heavily aligned to your skills, they will be the only folks who can extract enough value from your skills to compensate you for them.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat each curve as one sub-category of the industry? It would at least make things more intuitive. My salaries tend to be in the bottom-most curve (55k was my top yearly income) and any changes in salaries in the top curve would probably have little to no effect on prospects at the bottom.

But clients always had the option to do that. They could just decide not to work with contractors and only hire permanent staff instead. In fact that is the alternative that many of the biggest companies apparently decided to choose after the IR35 changes came into effect instead of adopting some kind of blanket umbrella policy. At least those ones were honest about their new strategy!

That's not true.

I've been harmed by HMRC mistakes and dodgy policies several times both personally and professionally. It's difficult when you're the one being messed around but you have to remember it's probably not personal. HMRC is a vast organisation implementing an insanely complicated set of rules that even its own staff don't always understand. It has nothing like the amount of resources it would need to credibly pursue a lot of the people who really are trying to rip off the tax man and by extension the public. It is sometimes like a wild animal - just acting on instinct - or in this case on standard procedures that lack the nuance they really need because there's nobody and no budget to do better.

Even so my personal experience has been that almost everyone I've actually spoken to who works at HMRC is at least reasonably neutral and professional. Some of them really will go out of their way to try and get a fair resolution if something has gone wrong and they become aware of it. In the situations I've been involved with personally we have always so far ended up with the right money in the right places and no lasting harm done even though sometimes it took far longer than it should have to reach that point.

And again if the policies HMRC is enforcing really are broken and someone who should be treated as a victim really is being seen as a tax dodger they really should contact their MP. Maybe the current rules actually are bad in this scenario and in that case until someone draws attention to the problem no-one is going to try to fix it.