Sports Coaches

[CorkGuy12]

Hi all,

I'm involved with a sports club (we're both a charity and a limited company). We have no employees, and any 'profit' is reinvested back into the club.

We have about 25 teenagers/students, who help out with the coaching of our younger members, and we've traditionally given them a few quid for helping out. We're starting to formalise this a bit now, and we plan to 'pay' the more experienced coaches €10 per hour, and the junior ones €5 per hour. (A lot of these are still training with us also) This year, we expect this to be in the region of about €30k, but we may end up with some of the more active coaches getting 3 or 4k in the year, and others just a few hundred.

We've always taken the attitude that it's just a donation towards their help (we still consider them as volunteers), and we've told them that they should look after their own tax affairs. In our accounts, we've just listed it as coaching expenses.

We do not want to get into the area of being employers, with all the headache that is likely to bring, with PRSI, holiday pay, etc especially being a volunteer run organisation.

We are now looking at giving them some sort of contract, basically saying simple things like they need to turn up on time, attend coach education sessions, appropriately dressed etc, and perhaps quoting the rate of 'pay' on this contract.

Is it ok to continue to tell them to look after their own tax liabilities? 90% of them would not have any other 'jobs' outside of the coaching, so wouldn't have any liabilities anyway. Of course this sort of 'grey' economy is all over the place (babysitting etc!) but we're a little worried that because of the scale of our operations, we might be in dangerous territory.

Any thoughts or advice would be welcome!

 

[andrewol]

I know some of the 3rd Level Colleges have gone away from this due to the expenses headache in paying some sports coaches "expenses" and put them on the payroll. This does bring additional headaches, allthough in most cases a decent accountant who does payroll wont charge too much to handle all of it for you. Possibly check with the accountant who currently does your annual accounts, or there are a few on here too!

That said, i dont know about there being anything wrong with coaches being paid expenses unless its being abused to avoid tax on salary.

As regards looking after their own tax liabilities, they would probably need to invoice you for this and would pay income tax as a sole trader on what you pay them.

Edit: On 2nd read - the contract your giving them would probably be closer to a contract of employment than anything so as such you would be getting into hiring them as staff.

 

[FENERO]

Hi tomod,

You need to refer to the Code of Practice for Determining Employment of Self-Employment, which can be found at this link. It is the last Code listed.

http://www.revenue.ie/en/practitioner/codes-practice.htmlhttp://www..revenue.ie/en/tax/.../code-of-practice-on-employment-status.pdf

Unfortunately you cannot just provide someone a contract in which it states that they are required to look after their own tax affairs, as you will see stated on pages 3 or 4 of this document.

You need to make sure that anyone you are making payments to falls into the criteria of self-employed as per this document, in order to ensure you have no requirement to operate PAYE/PRSI on the payments.

The criteria by which a person can be considered self-employed is set out on page 4.