All Anybody Needs to Know About Independent Contracting: With Forms, Instructions and Other Helpful Items [Paperback]

This book never should have been published. It is one of the most poorly written (I daresay, ignorently written) books I have had the displeasure to encounter. The author has a big axe to grind about government, and is highly politicized. There may be kernals of information here, but I don't trust anything the author says. I doubt that the content was controlled with fact-checking, corroboration, or even basic editing. These bits may give you a sense of how the book goes:

"It has reached such a stage that the concept of private employment is now a joke. The Federal and State governments now control employment. Personnel Offices are now called Human Relations Departments--further signifying the encroachment of socialistic concepts."

Excuse me, but "HR" stands for Human Resources, not Human Relations. If the author doesn't know this, I question any other "information" he has to impart. Even scarier, exactly how is it that HR departments signify socialistic concepts? No logic here.

Or how about this one, which reveals the true reason for the book:

"Most of you have chosen through the purchase of this Book to convert to dual hat status or to assure that your own conversion has been done properly. However, self-help always has its own risks. As we have repeatedly stated, perhaps too often, [name of his business] offers a money back guarantee and certification procedure, whereby our IC Member Specialists will certify that you are an IC, which will protect you against any problems you may have with anybody over any question of the propriety of your IC status."

Hmmm, that's quite a claim, is it not? Sounds like a lot of hokey, to me.

And why, please tell me, is the word "Book" capitalized? (I found many incorrectly capitalized words throughout the text.)

The author is part of a group (probably a group of one) that offers "Independent Contract Specialist" certification. Oh, please. It's pretty clear that this book is primarily a marketing tool for his business.

It doesn't get any better. I suffered, trying to wade through his poor writing to get the concepts he offers, and gave up after a bit, realizing that I could get the information from more trustworthy, accurate, and palatable sources.

I can't resist ending with an excerpt from the back cover:

"This Book provides you with everything you need to know about independent contracting to beat the IRS. Actually, they are on our side on this. The Law is on Our side. It is written simply and understandably. It traces the history of our present employment system wage/slave trap from the first of the Independent Contractors, the members of the glorious Guilds of England. It provides you with all of the information you or your company needs to Break the Wage-Slave Chains and the payroll trap. Read the heretofore-untold story about how the Congressional passage of the Safe Harbor Test came about. It was a great victory for the American Public. Great cost saving stuff for individuals and companies. Join the Employment Revolution."

Save your money. Check out the Nolo books, which are written by professionals, kept up-to-date via their web site, and trustworthy.

I've read the other reviews, and yes, I agree that Waxman would have been well served by having a better technical writer do a professional run-through to clean up the style. Releasing a well-edited second edition would be an improvement. That having been said, however, I agree with other reviewers that in CONTENT this book is well worth the investment and the read. If you are an employer or an employee and you want to know the pros and cons and how-tos of independent contracting vs. conventional employment, then you will not be disappointed with what there is to be learned by reading this book. Having read it, you will be in a position to create a good relationship with contractors, the local authorities, and the IRS, and you will know what to ask them, and what to tell them. Forgive the style; it is good data.

Writers Club Press is a publish-on-demand vanity press, so this book has not been through the normal editorial and fact-checking procedures of similar books from established publishing houses. The lack of editing shows in the writing style of the first several chapters, which read like an advertising brochure for the author's law practice. The author also has the irritating tendency to use self-coined two-letter acronyms throughout without explaining them the first time they come up (he includes a list in the very front of the book, instead, which makes for lots of flipping back and forth). In between the "I can set this up for you" comments, though, is some potentially useful information, stated in easy-to-understand terms.

Given that this stuff is just one guy's word, though, no matter how qualified this one guy appears to be (anybody can write anything and get it out there if they're self-publishing), you'll want to corroborate this information with other sources before you act on it. Of course, deciding to start an independent career and be your own boss is a big enough and complex enough decision that it'd be a good idea to do that kind of fact-checking regardless of the information source. Even if everything in this book is up-to-date and %100 accurate, you'd still need to find somebody (other than Waxman) to guide you on local and state legal issues, and would be well-advised to find good, qualified local financial advisor, as well. It simply isn't possible to put "all anybody needs to know" about the subject into one book.

The forms and abridged IRS documents included in the second half of the book look very useful and will probably be the handiest parts of the book.

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