Wet DBA: What It Actually Means When You Bring In Interim Finance Talent

If your company has brought in freelance or interim finance talent in the last year or two, you've probably felt a shift. Contracts carry more clauses than they used to. Legal or HR asks more questions before someone starts. Some businesses have started hesitating altogether, unsure whether they're structuring the engagement correctly. That caution has a specific source: Wet DBA. And since January 2025, it's no longer a law sitting quietly on the shelf.

What changed, and why it's your risk to manage

Wet DBA — the Wet deregulering beoordeling arbeidsrelaties — has existed since 2016. Its purpose is to catch schijnzelfstandigheid: a working relationship that's structured as freelance on paper but functions like employment in practice. For years, enforcement was effectively paused — the Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Authority) could investigate, but rarely with real consequences.

That moratorium ended on 1 January 2025. Enforcement is now back to normal, though the cabinet confirmed a partial "soft landing" running through 2026: routine non-compliance fines (verzuimboetes) still aren't being issued, but additional tax assessments (naheffingsaanslagen) are already a real possibility, and since 1 January 2026 the tax authority can impose actual penalties (vergrijpboetes) where intent or gross negligence can be shown.

None of this means interim finance expertise has become risky to bring in. Demand for it hasn't dropped, and it shouldn't — the point is simply that both sides now need to be deliberate about how the relationship is set up.

The nine-factor test, from your side of the table

There's no fixed checklist written into the law itself. Instead, Dutch courts — most notably the Supreme Court's Deliveroo and Uber rulings — established nine factors the Belastingdienst weighs together. They were written with gig-economy work in mind, but they apply just as directly to a senior interim finance leader sitting in your leadership meetings. Here's what each one means for a company doing the hiring.

• 1. Nature and duration of the work. A two-month maternity cover reads very differently than an open-ended engagement that's quietly run for years. The longer and more indefinite it gets, the more it can start to resemble employment.
• 2. Fixed working hours. Is the professional expected at their desk on your schedule, or do they genuinely control when the work gets done?
• 3. Integration into your organization. Do they appear on your internal org chart, get invited to every all-staff event, or carry an email signature identical to your employees'? This factor is weighed heavily for embedded interim roles specifically — worth watching closely.
• 4. Personal labor provision. Could the professional, in principle, send a qualified substitute to run a consolidation cycle in their place — or does the engagement really mean this one specific person?
• 5. How they're paid. A flat monthly amount that functions like a salary reads differently than an invoice tied to agreed deliverables or hours actually worked.
• 6. Commercial risk. Does the professional carry real business risk — their own liability insurance, the possibility you dispute an invoice, their own investment in tools and training — or does your company absorb all of that for them?
• 7. Visible entrepreneurship. Do they run multiple active clients, their own site, their own KvK registration — or has this one engagement quietly become their entire income?
• 8. Ability to refuse work. Could they turn down a task outside the agreed scope, the way an external advisor would — or are they expected to simply take direction like staff?
• 9. Their other engagements. Are they juggling other clients alongside yours, or has this single assignment become their whole working life?

No single factor is disqualifying on its own — a long, fixed-hours assignment isn't automatically a problem if everything else clearly points to genuine independence. But if most of the answers land on "just like an employee," that's worth a real conversation before the Belastingdienst asks the question for you.

What good practice looks like from your side

• Write the contract around deliverables and outcomes, not fixed hours and day-to-day supervision.
• Let the professional keep their visible independence — their own equipment, their own professional liability insurance, their own way of presenting themselves — rather than folding them into your org chart and internal systems as if they were staff.
• Keep scope narrow enough that new requests genuinely count as new requests, ones they could decline, rather than open-ended availability.
• Check that they're actually running other client work, not solely dependent on your engagement.
• If a "temporary" engagement is quietly heading into its second or third year, revisit whether the relationship still looks like independent contracting — or whether it's time to reconsider the structure.

Why this doesn't have to be complicated for you

One more thing on the horizon

A new law — the rechtsvermoeden van arbeidsovereenkomst op basis van een uurtarief (a legal presumption of employment based on a low hourly rate) — now has a confirmed date. The Eerste Kamer adopted it on 16 June 2026, it was published in the Staatsblad on 29 June 2026, and a royal decree fixed its entry into force at 31 December 2026. Below a threshold of €38/hour (based on the rate as of 1 January 2026, adjusted twice yearly), the law creates a rebuttable presumption of employment — meaning the burden shifts to your company to prove otherwise. Senior interim finance engagements are almost always priced well above that line, so this is unlikely to touch a director- or controller-level hire directly — but it's part of the same direction of travel, and worth knowing if a shorter or more junior piece of work is ever priced close to it.

Gabriella Sebők, MBA, FCCA, runs ProFor Interim Management and has spent 25 years in finance leadership roles across the Netherlands and internationally, the last several years almost entirely on interim assignments — including for organizations like Nike and Prosus/OLX. This article isn't legal advice; for a decision specific to your situation, talk to a Dutch employment lawyer or tax adviser.