Contractors who own holiday homes abroad need to be aware that HMRC has set up a new team of tax investigators to look into possible tax avoidance. The Treasury hopes to net at least £500 million from this new initiative by 2014-15.

The “affluent unit” team will consist of 200 investigators and specialists will use software to search through publicly available information in the hope of identifying people who own overseas property and who should have been paying income tax on rental income, or if a property has been sold – capital gains tax.

The investigators will make use of “risk assessment” tools in order to highlight individuals who do not seem to be declaring the right income and gains, as well as those who do not appear to have been able to afford to buy the property legitimately.

Owners of holiday homes will also be asked how they funded the purchase and whether they are declaring it as a source of income.

An HMRC spokesperson said the affluent unit would be targeting individuals with assets of at least £2.5 million, as well as those who should being paying the top rate of income tax. The unit will be modelled on the High Net Worth Unit, which brought in £247 million in its first two years.

This focus on overseas homes is another part of HMRC’s wider crackdown on tax evasion. David Gauke, the exchequer secretary to the Treasury, explained that HMRC has demonstrated increasing success in tackling tax evasion at home and abroad. The government is giving out a clear message that tax cheats no longer have anywhere to hide.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Happy Sky Pilot in Big Sur! by greenfaerietree

You have to laugh, you know. I never cease to be amazed at the number of posts I see about contractors claiming all sorts of problems with, variously, notice periods (don’t need them, as I’ve said before), IR35-safe contracts (fine as long as they represent reality), the AWR (don’t start me on that one again) and the infamous opt out from the Agency Regulations (opt out if you can but it makes little real difference). Plus, of course, the running complaint about the agency’s percentage of the contractor’s rate: except, of course, as ony fule kno they don’t get the percentage, the contractor does.

However there is a common theme to these various complaints. The agency.

We have to be fair to the poor agents themselves though. Increasingly they are run by accountants targeting sales figures and maximising margin. Little details like serving both sides in the contract have zero relevance to their business model. The individual agents are given achievement targets and so have no time for the niceties if they want to pay the mortgage. And of course it is much more cost effective to employ minimally experienced drones to handle the phones and use software to do the pattern matching between CV and job description.

All of which is fine if you’re dealing with a commodity market like general development, operations and service management roles. But it’s a serious problem for all sides if you are a little more senior, or have niche skills in some area or another. Or even if, like many, you aren’t a specialist in any given field, just a good, solid all-rounder who can make a success of any contract they’re given.

In effect you start from scratch every time you need a new contract. No matter how good you are, you still have to get through the auto-pilot box-ticking recruitment business we have these days. The one that says the agent gets a new role then stands there waving a piece of paper in the air to see who might be interested: usually several hundred, often hopelessly under qualified people on average. The signal to noise ratio in recruitment is actually appalling. How much cleaner if he had the resource to hand when the role comes in.

So how do we change the paradigm (see, I can do business speak as well…). The answer is surprisingly obvious.

The contractor pays the agent, not the client. Shock, horror…

Seriously, it would work. I have many skills but selling isn’t one of them, nor is cold-calling to find work (actually that’s just cowardice, but the result is the same). So why not outsource that part of the business to someone who does it for a living? The agent goes to the client with a zero margin deal. The contract would have to be B2B and, legally, you would have to be opted out of the Agency Regulations, both of which would appear to be good ideas. You know, solid in business indicators, no IR35, no AWR, no secret upper contracts…

There would be no hint of you being anyone’s employee either, since you’re at the top of the contract, not the bottom.

The agent would have to know who you are, what you can do, what you are worth and what your history is. He would be able to sell you actively and be incentivised to find you repeat business, since that’s where his margin comes from. He could specialise in given areas and build up a stable of people with the relevant skills, or he could be the one to fill the awkward jobs from his knowledge of his customers.

Best of all, you set the gross and the agent gets the percentage.

So what’s not to like? If you’re big enough and strong enough to build and justify a working reputation, and be able to be sold into an open market, why not go for it? I’d happily pay for that level of access and support, which has to be better than fighting your way to the top of some disinterested minion’s in tray to get noticed.

All we want is a couple of good agencies with the courage to bite the bullet and disregard the way they’ve always done it.

Ah. That might be a problem. Anyone know any brave, risk-taking agency FDs…?

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: SmiAl – Sad by Al aka pintofeggs

Contractors may have already encountered difficulties trying to obtain finance from their bank.

Shawbrook Bank has now published research findings that confirm that the leading UK banks are making it too hard for small businesses to get a loan.

45% of SMEs say that the level of bureaucracy is too high and a mere 6% think the process they have to go through when they apply for a loan is transparent. Furthermore, 89% of respondents said the banks lacked common sense when it comes to lending.

The CEO of Shawbrook Bank, Owen Woodley, said smaller forms should be receiving as much assistance as they need to help them grow and become successful. It’s a matter of grave concern that so many of them feel the loan application system is unclear and obstructive.

It is vital for a small business to be able to access the right finance when they need it if they are to expand and in order to achieve that we must have a lending process that is straightforward and efficient.

Shawbrook recently promised that it would make £250 million available to UK small enterprises next year.

Another problem facing small businesses is that credit agencies appear to have very different ways of assessing credit worthiness.

A recent study of the credit reports of private firms discovered a 150% average variation rate in the credit limits recommended by three high profile agencies. Although agencies do use different criteria to base their scores on, the size of the discrepancies is causing concern.

Phil McCabe from the FPB pointed out that a flawed credit report could mean the difference between success and failure for an entrepreneur.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: DUNCE by SLOTHY *33*BLKCLD*

I’ve been having a funny old week at work. For once I’ve got up to date on my deliverables and am waiting on assorted worthies to review and respond to the results. Meanwhile the technical team next door are working all hours God sent to keep up, while my in tray is almost empty. Well, it makes for a quiet, if rather boring life.

So I find myself taking a look around the world of contracting to fill in the time. And it seems there are some odd things going on out there in Reality.

My old mucker St Vince of Cable is at it again. So busy earning money he failed to notice he was over the VAT threshold. Luckily his accountants did notice – months late, but hey – and he sorted it out, paid the tax and the (very) small fine, job done. Silly mistake by someone with his vast experience of real business (two whole years as an Economics Advisor, wasn’t it?) and no real harm done. But on that subject, could I ignore a hard and fast taxation rule, forget to declare some taxable income for a few months, then discover my mistake and pay it back with a tiny penalty and a smack on the wrist? Don’t think so, somehow.

HMRC are apparently cheering about improving their take from IR35. Say what? It seems they are getting more money back from the pitifully few cases they manage to pursue to completion. What is more, this has been seized on by some who should know better as an example of the deterrent effect of IR35. Their argument is that people are paying taxes via umbrella companies rather than risk an IR35 investigation. So that’s OK then. After all, what could possibly be wrong about scaring people into paying taxes they don’t actually owe by threatening them with a piece of legislation so badly drafted it needs a three year investigation and court case to determine if it actually applies to this single set of circumstances?

AWR is continuing to cause hilarity among those who understand it. Not only are some agencies sending out letters asking contractors to declare themselves outside its scope – something you can’t actually do in any meaningful sense, of course – but they are persuading assorted Human Remains teams that using agencies protects them from the AWR. Say what (again)? Take someone on directly with no intermediate agency and the AWR is dead and buried. Using an agency increases the risk, not reduces it. Doublethink at its best, and a good illustration of why contractors don’t want anything to do with HR if they can possibly avoid them. Or agencies, come to that.

And finally, credit rating agencies. Not the big ones who are randomly downgrading assorted banks and even whole countries, although they’re bad enough, but the ones being used to credit check job applicants in line with FSA regulations and failing them, often on some pretty flimsy histories. Which means no job offer. Fair enough?

Well no, really. For one thing the FSA rule being quoted applies to people in a limited number of roles within financial services; directors and those who advise customers on fiscal matters, for example. It’s not actually meant to apply to the third DBA from the left in the support team. But hey, it’s an income stream for someone, so who cares that it’s both utterly irrelevant and genuinely damaging; I know someone who regularly has to turn down good people because of this nonsense.

Modern Britain in a nutshell. Never mind the outcomes, follow the rules no matter how idiotic and irrelevant those rules are. Truly we are a nation of jobsworths; after all, there’s no money in being a shopkeeper any more.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Ethan Nichtern Banner Illustration by bainesmcg

I thought it worth returning to the Agency Workers Regulations again, if only because I was ever so slightly amused by the reactions of certain agencies to them. With their industry’s usual instant and carefully controlled grasp of the subject, this week contractors started getting emails and letters from some agencies about how to manage the AWR. After the act had taken effect and therefore after the point at which you should react to it for an existing engagement. Genius, isn’t it?

Anyway, as is the way of such things, the letters are asking unanswerable questions.

The first one is “Do you work through a Limited Company or an Umbrella?”. Excuse me, but why do you have to ask? You have the contract in your filing system, along with the payment terms and the pointless fourteen pieces of ID. Don’t you know who you are dealing with? Please don’t tell me you weren’t even faintly interested in the company with whom you signed the contract. Silly old me thought you were dealing with MyCo when clearly you are only interested in dealing with me personally. OK, so that explains a lot, doesn’t it? Dropped the mask ever so slightly there, Mr Agent.

Secondly, “Do you consider yourself to be in business?”. Cue raucous laughter. I have signed a contract with you in my capacity as the Director of a UK Limited Company. A contract in which there are several clauses establishing that there is no employee-like relationship intended, which directs you to pay money into a business bank account and which charges you VAT. Does that not give you a slight hint that I’m trying very hard to be a business and not a temp from Office Angels?

Finally, “Do you consider you are operating inside or outside of IR35?”. Now you really are taking the Michael. We’re using your contract. You set up the deal with the end client, you know the requirement, you know what’s in your contract with them, and you understand how the client views the relationship between me and them. So why ask me? If I am inside IR35, it’s because you put me there, not the other way round.

Ok, so the poor dears are only trying to keep their masters happy and, as usual, de-risk everything as far as they can. Since you can’t actually opt out of the AWR anyway it’s all rather pointless, but if it makes them happy. Although there may be a different slant on this.

If the agencies, on behalf of their clients – who, we must remember, are actually those stout and highly aware souls in the Human Remains department – are concerned about the people they supply being in the scope of the AWR and so able to claim all these interesting extra benefits like holidays, there is a very simple way to prevent it. If you’re in business, you’re out of scope. It says so in the AWR itself.

So, Mr Agent, let’s make sure I am genuinely in business, as best we can, so the AWR can be ignored. This means that firstly you stop the pretence that you have this vast pool of experts at your disposal and you just send a couple of the most relevant over for the client to look at. Secondly that the client will exercise no direction and control over how the work is to be performed, beyond that minimum necessary that all workers will need to follow. And finally we drop all this pseudo-employee-with-multiple-exclusions contractual nonsense and start using simple business-to-business contracts. You know, something along the lines of “YourCo will supply these skills for this period to deliver this thing for which we will pay you this amount of money, conveniently broken down into weekly payments. The End”. It really could be that simple.

Hey, look at what we just did. We killed off IR35 as well. Gosh…

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Consensus Kills by miss_rogue

Nearly half of the UK’s B2B businesses, including accountants for contractors, are not utilising social media to their best advantage, according to research conducted by PricewaterhouseCooper.

The survey found that although companies are investing money in social media, they are not laying down clear usage strategies or investing in the necessary human resources to make it effective. In fact, less than one in eight B2B companies have a dedicated full-time social media team.

Sean Mahdi, from PwC, explained that social media is transforming the way we work and communicate with each other. Businesses have to adapt to a new way of engaging with customers, who increasingly put more trust in their peers.

B2C companies appear to be exploiting social media with much more success than B2B organisations, he added.

Social media is not only used to drive sales. It can be used to create loyalty to a particular brand, demonstrate that a company is being transparent and responsible and used to create two way dialogue. It is therefore essential for businesses to draw up a strong social media strategy in order to interact successfully with customers.

Network security professionals agree that using social media in the workplace can be good for business, but that it can create risks that companies lack the tools to address.

The Ponemon Institute questioned 4,640 IT practitioners and contractors in twelve countries, including the UK and Hong Kong, and 63% of respondents said that social media usage put their organisation at risk. 52% said their business suffered more malware and virus attacks now that their employees used social media.

Even though the majority of companies allow their employees to use social media at work, 89% of respondents felt it diminished productivity.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Social Media Magazin by some_communication

As well as being technically proficient, independently minded and a bit intolerant of rigid work patterns, we’re also a tolerant bunch, us contractors. You kind of get used to having to dig out the truth from the often intentional obfuscation you get from the agencies, the client, the civil service and a host of other places. And you get to recognise some universal truths.

“Cyclists can ride safely on footpaths”. Yeah right…

“All contractors are very well paid”. Well we aren’t exactly running on empty, but we are usually pretty good at what we do, and command a decent rate accordingly. But the average rate for IT contractors as a whole is around £40 a hour these days,which is near as damn it the same net take home as a permanent employee on £40,000 a year; good but not exceptional.

“We require you to opt out of the Agency Regulations”. No you don’t. For one thing it’s nothing to do with you, Mr Agent. It’s not my problem if you’ve agreed a contract with the client that is incompatible with the requirements of an Opted-In contract for me. Since 95% of all Opt Outs aren’t legally correct, from what I’ve seen, why not work on the assumption that everyone is opted in? Ah, of course, then you wouldn’t be able to claim that the workers you supply are your own dedicated resources, would you?

“Opting In is highly beneficial”. Well, is it? The two key gains are guaranteed payment and a time limit on handcuff clauses. The former may have a superficial appeal, but if the agency’s not got any money they aren’t going to pay you anyway. The latter looks nice, but there will be the upper contract between agency and client that almost certainly stops them taking you on for at least as long as the period in your own contract. So where’s the handcuff limitation protection then?

“Retain 85% of your gross with our compliant solution”. Yeah, right. You do until the scheme gets legislated out of existence, the scheme owners do a runner or you discover the scheme doesn’t actually work in the first place. Then again Hector has recently given up trying to shut down some of these schemes because they can’t safely separate out those who should genuinely use them, like pension funds, and those who are taking advantage. Although that won’t stop them trying.

“We need to retain IR35”. Ah, now, hang on a minute. That was Osborne’s position in the last budget, when for a while we thought we had proven that IR35 was not only damaging and spiteful, it wasn’t actually earning any money for HMRC. The case was slightly hampered by the repeated assertion that there are no figures specifically covering IR35 within the ledgers of the Treasury. So we kind of accepted Osborne’s assertion that he needed it to dissuade Friday-to-Monday converts. (This despite one of the more obvious cases being Mr Hartnett, ex permanent Head of HMRC, now freelance Acting Head of HMRC. Didn’t even have to empty his waste bin). And the implicit assertion that since he wasn’t keeping any measure that wasn’t cost-effective, then IR35 was paying its way.

Then, all of a sudden, PCG gets a very interesting answer to an FIO request. It seems those figures do exist. What’s more, they are pretty damning: total case prosecuted over the last five years? Three hundred and twenty two. That’s slightly over one a week. Total revenue gained as a result? Five million, four hundred and forty two thousand, two hundred and ninety nine pounds. A shade over a million a year. Or just under seventeen thousand per case, assuming all were successful, which they almost certainly weren’t. Doesn’t exactly go very far against the one trillion government shortfall, does it…

Ok, so this is interesting. We have been told more than once that no figures on IR35 were being kept. You can even find that in Hansard. Now, suddenly, they have been. Most odd. So who’s kidding who, Mr Osborne?

And who in the previous administration was responsible for the earlier statements. I think we need to be told.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Urban Art by freeflyer09

Accountants for contractors with clients in the construction sector may be unsurprised at the news that SMEs in this sector are having difficulties recovering from the recession.

Baker Tilly has surveyed construction SMEs whose annual turnover is between £5 million and £25 million and discovered that more than 25% of them have seen sales decrease by at least 20%.

The study also found that one in six construction SMEs is at risk of failing to repay its short and medium term debts. Furthermore, nearly 33% have seen their Profit Before Tax decrease by more than 50%. Despite this, liquidity in the construction sector is stronger than it is for SMEs across all sectors.

Mark Wilson, one of Baker Tilly’s partners, explained that some construction companies may have cash reserves but a lot will find the cash starts to run out as sales and profits continue to decrease. Slashing prices to win contracts does not help the bottom line and is not a sustainable solution in the long term.

He went on to say that the impact of government spending cuts and rising costs will increase the pressure on small firms in the construction sector. The cost of raw materials is rising throughout the world and this is hitting construction companies’ profits harder than firms in other sectors.

Denis Baker, the chief executive of Company Watch, also commented on the research findings saying that as well as highlighting liquidity issues, the fall in profitability and revenues will concern contractors, clients and suppliers who should take a proactive role in minimising their exposure to possible construction company failures.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Construction work by tillwe

Regular readers will know I have never had a lot of respect for the average agency, thinking that most of them exhibit a degree of professional casualness totally at odds with their advertising. Today, for example, I got another email offering me work as a support technician in the Midlands at a whole £20k a year. Be still my beating heart.

But this week, one of them has managed to surpass even that fairly mediocre level of success.

Someone in Hays thought it a good idea to remind the people contracting through them to RBS to complete their timesheets prior to the bank holiday weekend. So they sent out an email, with, for some reason, an attachment. Followed very quickly – but not quickly enough, needless to say – by a recall of the email.

Why? Because the attachment contained a list of 3000 contractors, their day rate, the day rate to Hays and a few other interesting details. It seems that some of these contractors are on really quite juicy rates. Oops…

OK, so perhaps that’s the rate for a senior HR manager in charge of a multi-million pound restructuring programme, but needless to say the ignorati rapidly jumped on the bandwagon, demonstrating a total lack of knowledge of several fairly key areas.. The meeja started it, shouting about excess salaries for temporary staff. A spokesman from Unite – who, let us not forget, are representing workers and so might be expected to have at least a working understanding of the labour market – started banging on about “overpaid contractors” taking work from “permanent staff”. Assorted comments in a range of newspapers picked up the baton. A shadow Treasury Minister came out with the same line. OK, so he’s a politician of course, so we shoudn’t expect too much wisdom perhaps.

The thing is, to a man they were going on about excessive salaries. Nobody can possibly be worth that much (well they can, actually, work out the cost of employment of a permie on an £80k salary plus bonus and package). And what is more, as ony fule kno these aren’t salaries, they’re payments to companies for services rendered. To convert them into salaries, you have to knock off the long list of expenses that contractors have to cover for themselves – employers NICs, holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, expenses, bench time funding, corporation tax and all the rest. And even then you probably haven’t got to a salary since you don’t know how much the contractor is taking back out of his company.

Or perhaps these deluded souls actually think that the fitter from British Gas charging you £80 an hour to fix your boiler is on £166,000 a year salary? I suppose that’s quite likely, given the state of our education system…

The really sad thing is that we have a unique and highly effective contractor workforce in this country. Its end clients – like RBS – recognise its worth and understand the economic realities that make a contractor a very good use of money. One recent client of mine paid £60k for a contractor’s services over several months, but he left them with a £430,000 saving. Which I, and they, think is actually not a bad return.

Good contractors are worth their day rate. Such a shame that people who probably understand that perfectly well prefer to distort reality in the pursuit of cheap, and very hypocritical, political point scoring.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Superman (Christopher Reeve) by MEDIODESCOCIDO

An interesting idea was floated this week on one of the websites I haunt. Someone was getting just a little exasperated at the identity proving process we all suffer these days, and rather than drive 50 miles to an agency’s offices to show them his passport was wondering if having a Skype video conference with the agent while holding his passport would suffice.

General response was along the lines of nice idea, but these are agencies we’re dealing with so probably not. It’s not that we have any objections to proving we are who we say we are; it is to everyone’s benefit, after all. But the whole thing is getting just a little surreal.

Start with the passport thing. What everyone fails to remember is that a passport is only proof of identity if you are the one holding it. Copies, be they full colour images, redacted black and white scans, video image, even with you in the frame – none of these are proof of anything beyond your skills with a digital camera. You have to be there, holding it, at which point the other guy can take a copy of the photo page – nothing else just that page – for their own records.

And there’s another issue. The more peripatetic contractors – like me, for instance – go through this farce several times a year. Just how safe are all these copies of a Crown documents, I wonder? And how many of them are deleted once they are no longer needed?

And given the quality of most of my communications from agencies, just how accurate are the supporting records anyway? We will never know…

The real irritation, though, is that the whole exercise is totally unnecessary. And, as usual, we have to look to those bastions of professionalism and awareness, the agencies and the Human Remains Resources teams.

Because HR are usually in the loop for hiring contractors, they only think of them as pseudo-employees. OK, that’s an old argument that bores even me, but it’s still true. Therefore the master contract the agency has with the end client’s HR team is framed in terms of employment law. This, among other things, lays fearful penalties on clients who don’t ID check their employees.

Agencies, being at the higher end of the risk averseness scale, take great care not to offend. Hence they go to great lengths to ensure everyone they touch is checked. Except I am not an employee of anyone, I am an independent supplier. I’ve checked the people I send out to work for me and am more than willing to assert that I know who they are and that they are allowed to be here. And take any penalties you care to throw at me if I’m wrong. And since I’m not the agency’s employee – much as they like to pretend we are – and certainly not the client’s, there is no legal obligation to ID check me all over again.

All that has to happen is for agencies to have two contracts with their clients: one for employees, one for freelancers. Do that and not only do a lot of contractual arguments go away – along with 90% of the threat of IR35 and the AWR of course – but they save themselves hundreds of pointless man hours a year which, you might think, would appeal to the bean counters who run most agencies these days.

But far too simple a solution will never catch on. Especially if nobody triers to sell it.

And just to close, how about this for idiocy. One guy was asked for his NI number as well as his passport and “other documentary proof of address” to get a building pass. NI numbers aren’t a proof of anything, as the Home Office is at pains to point out. For one thing, while the numbers are unique they may have been given to, or used by, more than one person. So not really a lot of good to anyone as a proof of anything.

One day, sanity will prevail. I suspect I’ll have retired by then.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited

Image: The Usual Suspects by Dylan Parker

Owners of small businesses, contractors and freelancers should have in-depth knowledge of their own sector before approaching banks for investment funds, advises the British Bankers Association.

The BBA claims that SMEs will have a better chance of getting a loan if they are prepared to answer a barrage of questions about their respective industry.

Angela Knight, the BBA’s chief executive, said that it is imperative that you understand your market; what it looks like, is it a growth market? Is it vibrant? How large is your customer base?

Business owners should also compile a realistic set of forecasts showing costs and projected income. These numbers should be discussed with the bank to make sure they look right and are presented correctly.

In the financial year ending April 2010, total business angel investment activity dropped to £60.5 million, a decrease of 3.7% on the previous year, according to the Annual Report on Business Angel Activity in the UK.

Entrepreneurs have found it increasingly difficult to obtain funding for new start-ups. As a result, owners started exploring angel funding whereby wealthy individuals provide private equity and get shares in the business in return.

However, business angels were also affected by the recession and they had less money to invest in new ventures. The ARBAA report also showed that there were 4,555 registered business angels in the UK between 2009 and 2010, but only 37% of them were active and less than 10% made any investment during the period.

Despite the drop in activity, Mark Prisk, the business and enterprise minister, said the study shows the important role business angels have to play in financing new businesses. He went on to say he hoped businesses will continue to look to angels when they need business expertise and guidance as well as funding.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: I don’t know by Hilary Perkins

Employers may not be too pleased to learn that 14 million working hours per week are currently being lost due to employees and contractors looking for other jobs whilst at work.

Monster recently surveyed more than 2,000 jobseekers, all of whom currently have a job, and discovered that 28% of them spend more than three hours of working time every week looking for another position. 16% spend more than five hours and 7% spend in excess of ten hours a week job hunting.

If these figures were indicative of the UK workforce as a whole, employers would be losing more than £250 million each week due to these job hunting activities.

Employees and contractors are not only surfing the net looking for jobs. 60% admit to doing online job searches, but 50% also update their CV at work, 49% actually apply for new positions and nearly 25% conduct telephone interviews from office phones.

However, 40% of employees think their boss knows what they’re doing and 12% have been caught, either by their boss or one of their colleagues. 2% of the survey’s respondents had been fired for their job hunting at work activities.

Doctor’s appointments are the most common excuse used when it comes to attending interviews. Strangely enough sickness and domestic emergencies come lower down the excuse list than pet emergencies and needing to be at home to receive a delivery.

Monster spokeswoman, Isabelle Ratinaud, said that job hunting is time consuming and the survey’s results show just how desperate some people are to move. However, although it may be tempting to job hunt during your employer’s time, this could affect references and result in disciplinary action and dismissal.

© 2011 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Image: Using a Magnifying Glass and Driving by MIke Kline