Decades since it was first recognized, the deliberate misclassification of workers by contractors remains a big problem. Federal legislation, reintroduced last year, is likely to go nowhere, so it's worth asking what, if anything, has worked at the state level. As it turns out, there are some promising examples, even if none of them can serve as a perfect template for national law.
Briefly, an employer who intentionally misclassifies a worker as an independent contractor is able to avoid paying state and federal taxes and workers'-compensation premiums. It is possible to accidentally misclassify a worker out of confusion, but intentional misclassification remains a flourishing category of fraud, and honest contractors lose work because of it every day. State-level reforms help and have added many millions of dollars to treasuries that otherwise would have been cheated out of the income.