Talk:Unreported employment

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The contents of the Illicit work page were merged into Unreported employment on 25 July 2018. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

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I created this article to describe the practice of what many people colloquially refer to as "working under the table." However, I do not know what the technical legal term is, and I cannot find any alternative terms. If one can be found, this article should be renamed as such, with all synonyms mentioned early on.

This article is in its infancy, and any help to improve it is appreciated.

My ultimate goal for this article is:

• A global perspective
• A thorough list of commonly performed types of work and reasons for making this choice
• Advantages and disavantages faced by employees, employers, and others in such an arrangement
• A description of activities on part of governments to enforce laws being broken

Hellno2 19:08, 3 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have some issues with the enforcement section, in particular this:

"the only reason it does not exercise this right is the high cost of prosecution and imprisonment"

This statement does not convey any information. It can be said of pretty much any budgeted enforcement department, by definition, that failures to fully exercise its jurisdiction are because of the cost that would be involved in doing so. While I see no harm in a general statement highlighting that there are limits to practical enforcement, saying that cost is the *only* reason smacks, to my mind, of defining all activities in terms of profit and loss and then pointing out that all decisions are essentially financial, which seems circular to me. The other major problem is the assumption that custodial sentencing is the only means to punish tax evasion.

"(ironically, this high tax has no funds due to unreported income itself)."

This seems very shaky to me. All governments take tax from one department to fund another, so it is a huge fallacy to imply that each department has to fund its own prison inmates. While several motivations exist for punishment in general, tax enforcement's main purpose is to deter evasion, and this benefits all of government. It makes sense, therefore, that government would foot the bill for tax enforcement itself to some degree.

91.135.1.212 (talk) 13:23, 20 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The article's lead paragraph ends with the sentence "It also includes editing Wikipedia for reward contrary to Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use" with 2 citations, to an article about people trying to edit Wikipedia for pay and to Wikipedia's terms of use. However, neither of these sources use the term "unreported employment" to describe this bad practice, therefore, although editing Wikipedia for reward (at least without disclosing a conflict of interest) is indeed bad, I'm not sure it counts as "unreported employment": the paid editors could be being paid a normal salary with all tax processed legally and above-board, they just forget to disclose that on Wikipedia itself (which is not the same thing as not disclosing it to the tax authorities: both are bad but different things).

But when I removed that text with an appropriate comment in the Edit Summary, my removal was reverted with a mild warning about policy on my IP page. So in line with