The Chairperson of ICMSA’s Farm Business Committee, Pat O’Brien, has called on the Government to address what he said was a serious anomaly that had farmers who had changed their enterprise status from ‘Sole Trader’ to ‘Partnership’ being asked to pay often sizable amounts of ‘back’ PRSI on the grounds that children of the family working the farm – who had been classified as ‘Class M’ under ‘Sole Trader’ status – were now employees of a ‘Partnership’ and were categorised under ‘Class A’ requiring a PRSI payment from their employer (their parents).
Describing the change in employee status for the purposes of PRSI as bureaucratic and absurd, Mr O’Brien said that ICMSA was actively engaged in trying to convince the Department of Social Protection that in a situation where farms were trying to encourage the next generation of farmers to ‘take on board’ the realities and challenges of farm succession, it was utterly hopeless and counter-productive to classify the children of a fam family as standard employees on whom PRSI must be paid.
“We are trying to show the next generation that there’s a future in farming and that it is possible to make a living – and here we have an anomaly that has children of the farmer that are classified as employees being treated as non-family ‘standard’ employees on whom PRSI must be paid in accordance with their ‘Class A’ categorisation.
“It’s just absurd and means that those children are moved further away from any possibility of one of them expressing an interest in taking over the farm. If we are serious about farm succession, then we have to recognise the special circumstances around a family farm that make the idea of it as a standard employer with ‘employees’ just unworkable.
“ICMSA is determined to address this absurdity and we’ll be raising it at every opportunity and most specifically at the Commission on Farm Transitions next year”, said Mr O’Brien.
