It seems like a tactic too ridiculous to work: a company looking for a way to cut costs announces that its employees aren’t actually “employees,” but are instead “independent contractors” who just happen to work there full time. Therefore, the company isn’t legally obligated to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for them, or to provide them with workers compensation when injured, unemployment compensation when laid off, protection from discrimination or any other benefits.

It may seem ridiculous – but it’s happening to millions of workers , and it’s costing federal and state governments billions of dollars and preventing hard-working men and women from reaching the American Dream.

It’s called “employee misclassification,” and it takes advantage of the fact that the law requires companies to do things for their full-time employees that they don’t have to do for independent contractors.

When you think of an “independent contractor,” you probably think of someone who works for many companies over the course of a year, on projects of fixed length – not someone who has been working full time for a single company for years. But loopholes in the law allow companies to call those full-time employees “independent contractors.”

We call it tax cheating, and it needs to be stopped.