The corporate self-employed are entitled to the flat rate

For a long time, the restrictive interpretation of the flat rate regulations for self-employed persons meant that this benefit only applied to self-employed individuals who were natural persons. Due to the change in the TGSS criteria, the flat rate will also apply to self-employed companies.

The self-employed who were partners in commercial companies and requested, in recent years, the flat-rate application, saw how they were denied, but now they have the opportunity to complain. The change has been due to the jurisprudence that has been issued by several courts in the same sense and that, finally, has been recognised by the Administration.

Why wasn’t the flat rate applied to the self-employed until now?

Some of the arguments that Social Security used to not apply the flat rate to the self-employed are the following:

• In the Law of the Statute of the Self-Employed Worker, specifically in article 31, a regulator of the flat rate, it does not expressly speak of the corporate self-employed person, but partners of labour societies and cooperatives.
• Commercial companies’ partners are a different figure from the self-employed since their responsibility is limited to the capital contributed to the entity. The self-employed individuals or partners of cooperative societies or communities of assets, among other figures, respond with your entire estate of debts.

The judgment that drove the change

As we said before, several judgments have prompted the change of criteria so that the plant rate is also applied to self-employed companies. One of the most prominent is the Judgment of the Supreme Court of December 3, 2019, in which A 25-year-old single managing partner of an SLU, who had not previously carried out any economic activity and had registered as self-employed, is recognised the right to apply the flat rate and to have the corresponding differences returned to previous quotes.

What does the change of criteria entail?

The fact that the self-employed can apply the flat rate has several consequences:

• That they will be able to benefit from the discounts that the flat rate supposes, although the rate will be slightly higher since the minimum contribution base for self-employed companies is also higher.
• That the self-employed companies to whom the flat rate has been denied may request the return of the fees that Social Security has collected in excess, the term to claim is four years after the payment of each instalment.

To benefit from the flat rate, self-employed companies must meet the requirements established by law: that they register for the first time in the self-employed regime or have not been registered in the last two years as self-employed.

The change in the interpretation of the law supposes applying a criterion of equality among all the self-employed to favour entrepreneurship.