Reducing the Administrative Burden for Independent Workers
Cassie Divine, Business Leader for the Self-Employed Segment within Intuit’s Small Business Division, identifies three main problems of independent workers: untangling business expenses from personal, getting paid gross income (often inconsistently), and filing taxes. The biggest pain point overall, Divine says, is finding work and getting paid for that work. Quickbooks Self-Employed seeks to mitigate the administrative burdens faced by independent workers, so they can focus more on the actual work, and less on the attendant responsibilities that come with this work. The self-employed workforce has grown tremendously in the past 25 years, from 17 percent of the workforce to around 36 percent. In the next five years, roughly half of the workforce is projected to be engaged in independent work in some capacity. As the economy continues to change, our laws and regulations need to change along with it. “I’d love to see a world [where] being your own boss is just as good as working for somebody else, if not ten times better,” Divine said.
From the frequency of Schedule C (the tax form of the self-employed) audits to the difficulty of obtaining loans without traditional pay stubs, independent workers find themselves operating in a system not designed for them. Divine’s goal through her work at Intuit is aligned with a larger goal of this Future of Work series: how do we change some of these systems that favor traditional workers, and have them favor and empower the independent worker? While regulation is slow to catch up to technological advances, there have been recent signs of progress. The state of New York passed the Freelance Isn’t Free act in 2016, which offers new protections for freelancers with outstanding invoices, and the Obama administration introduced the SupplierPay Initiative, which encouraged companies to make efforts to pay small businesses and contractors on time. In the private sector, PwC and Ernst & Young recently launched gig work job boards, indicating their desire to incorporate more independent workers into the folds of their organizations.
Divine also talked about her own experience running an Etsy store (while working full-time at Intuit and raising her daughter) an experience which has given her valuable insights into the advantages and disadvantages of full-time versus independent work. Divine’s business, which allows parents to take sweatsuits and turn them into animal costumes “started out of a passion of mine to help people create. Things like marketing your business, things like writing copy to go with your product—there are a lot of things related to the business of having a business that I did not enjoy. Even the things that in my day job I do a lot of, when it came to my business, I didn’t want to spend the time on that. So I can appreciate software tools that get rid of all that stuff so you can focus on what you care about.”
