Operationalising Holistic Approaches to Tackling Undeclared Work

The twelfth meeting in plenary of the European Platform tackling undeclared work (henceforth “the Platform”) was held in Bratislava on 23-24 March 2022 as a hybrid meeting both onsite as well as online. The first day of this meeting was a thematic day dedicated to the topic of operationalising holistic approaches to tackling undeclared work. The Platform tackling defines the holistic approach as: “Where national governments use a whole government approach to tackle undeclared work, by joining-up on the policy and enforcement level of both strategy and operations the fields of labour, tax and social security law, and involve and cooperate with social partners and other stakeholders. This approach involves using the full range of direct and indirect policy measures available to enhance the power of, and trust in, authorities respectively. The objective is to transform undeclared work into declared work in an effective manner.” To discuss the operationalisation of this holistic approach, each component was addressed in different sessions. Firstly, the session in plenary addressed the development of cross-government joined-up strategy to achieve the strategic objective of transforming undeclared work into declared work. To cover the remaining components, two parallel workshops were then held on joining-up national and cross-border operations (Workshop 1) and developing cross-government cooperation on data collection, sharing and analysis (Workshop 2), followed by two further parallel workshops on improving social partner involvement (Workshop 3) and beyond deterrence: adopting the full range of preventative measures (Workshop 4). This report summaries the presentations, discussion, and key outcomes.