I'm currently working as a Freelance interpreter at the moment. Unfortunately, I just had a huge row with my dad, who thinks that I should have been claiming the full Income-based Jobseekers Allowance (£72.40 every 2 weeks currently) despite the sporadic income from my freelance job and if I don't resume the claim, he'll cut my access off (the reaction's a bit extreme I think and I reckon my dad takes things a bit badly and over-react at times).
However, I disagree with him because the "Professional Conduct" part of the contract from the translation agency I'm working on behalf of currently says "Under the terms of this contract, the interpreters or translators are considered to be Self-employed and therefore liable to pay their own tax and national insurance contributions", but the translation agency has not told us how to declare it either.
Meanwhile, at present, the JobCentrePlus advisor suggested that I should register on HMRC's website and I already got an e-mail stating that I should be getting my Unique Taxpayers' Reference number within the next 10 days (to declare as "Freelance"). At the same time, I'm also considering applying for other positions that are "full-time employed" at the moment. Currently, my earnings from the freelance interpreting job are a bit sporadic because the job is on a "deploy when required" basis and you only get paid from the scheduled start time until the end of the appointment at the location (the number of hours per week working freelance is very sporadic because I could get a couple of assignments in one week (if I'm lucky), or I could get no assignments for several weeks).
The only other problem is that I'm not sure if the circumstances described above would mean that I would be eligible for a "Certificate of Small Earnings Exception" (SEE) or not though either.
Looking forward to hearing your reply to this query.
PS-It would be good to know for future reference, but I may not necessarily need the answer to the query if my Royal Mail Christmas Casual job at a sorting in December gets successfully converted to a permanent post after all. 🙂
