Chair of the ICMSA farm business committee, Pat O’Brien has called on the government to address what he described as a “serious anomaly” with PRSI for farmers looking to change their enterprise status from ‘sole trader’ to ‘partnership’.
O’Brien said that farmers are often faced with paying “sizable amounts” of “back” PRSI on the grounds that children 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’.
O’Brien said that in a situation where farms are trying to encourage the next generation of farmers to “take on board the realities and challenges of farm succession”, that the PRSI payment was “counter-productive”.
The ICMSA is currently engaged with the Department of Social Protection in the hope to explain why PRSI is an issue in this case.
“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,” O’Brien said.
PRSI issue
“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,” O’Brien said.
He added that the ICMSA will address the issue at “every opportunity” and in particular at the Commission on Farm Transitions next year.