Undeclared Work: An Activity-Based Legal Typology

Abstract

Undeclared work has been convincingly defined as ‘any paid activity that is lawful as regards its nature (i.e. is not criminal) but not declared to public authorities, taking into account differences in the regulatory system of Member States' (COM(1998) 219 final, 4). Such an activity-based definition has been chosen because ‘it allows for the inclusion of forms of undeclared work that are popular in Europe and which are excluded in enterprise and/or jobs-based definitions. Prominent examples include: the under-reporting of income by self-employed people and formal businesses, which are excluded in an enterprise-based definition; and “envelope wages”, whereby a formal employee receives part of their wage on a declared basis and the remainder on an undeclared basis. Both jobs and enterprise-based definitions omit these forms of undeclared work, since the worker is in a formal job and the work takes place in a registered enterprise’ (Williams, Renooy 2008, 5). Starting from this definition, the paper aims to: 1. conceptualise ‘paid activity‘; 2. identify active and passive registration and declaration duties, their object, their general and specific purposes and the public authorities involved; and 3. typify the breaches of legal duties of registration and/or declaration referring them to the juridical or physical person performing each activity.