In Poland, contracts for specific work are among the most popular civil law contracts. Although contracts for specific work concluded by the employer with persons who are not their employees are not subject to contributions, from January 1, 2021, employers will be required to register these contracts with ZUS. Therefore, this issue is of great interest to the clients of our accounting firm, PRWT.

The above obligation (the obligation to register specific work contracts with ZUS from 1 January 2021) was included in Polish Anti-crisis Shield, i.e. article 22 of the Act of March 31, 2020. amendment to the act on special solutions related to prevention, counteraction and combating COVID-19 other infectious diseased and the crisis situations caused by them and certain other acts, which introduced significant changes to contracts for specific work. As is clear from the above of the article, the payer of contributions or a natural person – the ordering party will be obliged to inform ZUS about the conclusion of any contract for a specific task, if such a contract is concluded with a person with whom the payer or the ordering party is not employed or if the employed person does not perform work under such contract for the employer, with whom he or she is employed, within 7 days from the date of concluding this contract.

How to register that contract?

The person ordering the work will have to register the contract with ZUS within 7 days from January 2021 on a special notification form (RUD). Information on concluded contracts will be visible on the account of the contribution payer. The employer will not have to register a specific work contract if with the same person has also concluded another contract on which contributions are paid.

What does this obligation mean for employers?

According to the arguments presented by the Polish Government, the purpose of changes in the regulations is enabling ZUS to verify whether the contracts called “specyfic task contract” are not actually contract of mandate for which social security contributions should be paid. Contribution payers should therefore review concluded contracts for a specific task, as well as analyze whether they are correctly classified as contracts of a result. From 2021, ZUS will have the facility to control the correctness of concluded contracts for a specific task, and in the event of questioning them, it will be able to order the payment of contributions for incorrectly classified contracts together with interest.

The analysis of the content of civil law contracts performed in our accounting office with the help of lawyers cooperating with our accounting company will allow to eliminate the existing interpretation problems with which PRWT Accounting and Business Service limited liability company in this respect, meets every day.