Employment: Are Online Surveys or Paid Opinion Surveys a Business1?

  By: Chris Palmer

Jobs Employment, Career Job, Employment Job

Paid Surveys for Income is essentially being a Self Employed Contractor

For the greater part, paid survey online opportunities require the participant to be a self employed operator because they are generally not paid as an employee by the Survey Owner. This type of employment arrangement, which we will call working arrangement because it is not employment in the true sense, is no different to a multitude of others who work in a Contracting and Freelance capacity. You will be responsible for invoicing the payer, keeping your own accounting records and filing your own tax returns. The legalities of this arrangement do vary between countries so you will need to investigate your own specific requirements.
So for most, this working arrangement means you can claim related business expenses such as travel, phone, office rent etc which can all be benefits when compared to an employee arrangement which has little or no expenses that can be deducted.

How are you a business?

In the tax and legal sense you are however this Contracting lifestyle is very attractive for many because the risk and cost associate with developing your own product and service range and client base is eliminated. Many people run businesses from home and experience the associated risk of developing something from scratch before they are able produce a full time living. Others pay a princely sum to acquire an existing business which has an established cash flow however there are no guarantees and this can disappear if the right level of business acumen is not continually invested.