FCSA Umbrella – JSA – Proven to be Pocketing Holiday Pay

A former JSA contractor has provided Contractor Voice with indisputable evidence that JSA, one of the founders of the FCSA, intentionally withholds Holiday Pay, in this case to the tune of £2,865.50 for a short six-month period of employment. Let’s not forget readers, that’s money an end-client paid for it to be paid to the contractor, not for JSA to keep and add to its income!

During the relatively short life of Contractor Voice, it has been provided with significant evidence that some umbrellas pocket Holiday Pay and keep it for themselves, but never have we seen such complete clear evidence of it. What’s more and as you will read, JSA fight tooth and nail not to pay despite repeated requests for payment. This dogged determination to refuse to pay surely must have been dictated by those at the top of the JSA tree.

The full scale to which JSA has unlawfully withheld Holiday Pay is not yet known, however, when factoring in its connected businesses, it will have employed many thousands and perhaps 10’s of thousands of contractors over many years; the total pocketed Holiday Pay suggests that it could be financially ruinous and many millions of pounds.

Contractor Voice believes that its revealing of the evidence will now start a tidal wave of evidence being released to prove that Holiday Pay has been systematically withheld by umbrellas. However, it points out that it is not just JSA and other big hitter FCSA umbrellas that now need to be concerned. Professional Passport mandates the requirement to offer ‘accrued Holiday Pay’ and while this may have been introduced for the benefit of contractors, it will have opened the opportunity for umbrellas to engage in this malpractice; it is well known that umbrellas, with and without a so called ‘accreditation’, have been pocketing Holiday Pay for years.

Do employment agencies that have the offending umbrellas on their PSLs need to be worried about exposure and financial ruin? Emphatically, yes! It is well known in the sector, including those heading BEIS, APSCo and REC that many agencies receive a cut of the withheld Holiday Pay and that, as well as other suspect financial arrangements, is why the agencies insist on their candidates using those umbrellas.

What does the future of the FCSA look like now that a founding member with huge control over it has been outed? With other co-founders including Giant, Brookson and Parasol Group being subject to successful cyber-attacks, the vast amount of compromised personal data on the dark web and more Holiday Pay evidence to come naming other FCSA umbrellas, the future is looking bleak. The FCSA Holiday Pay scandal has been in the public domain for a long time now, so what has it done to insist that all its members pay-up the historically withheld pay and ensure that withholding does not continue? Perhaps the FCSA’s answers to yesterday’s questions from the APPG will enlighten us so we can understand how on earth this unlawful practice been allowed to continue for so many years despite the very questionable independent vigorous auditing of members that it is so proud of.

Although the spotlight is not yet so much on Professional Passport, Contractor Voice urges the APPG to ask it the same questions it put to the FCSA as we believe that many of its members will soon be named and shamed for Holiday Pay abuse.

Contractor Voice does not believe that BEIS, APSCo or REC will come out of this unscathed. We have urged the three of them to act and to make it public what they intended to do, but they have done nothing and allowed the abuse to continue unchecked resulting in contractors losing millions of pounds every month.

So, in all its glory and to the shame of JSA, here’s what we provide for our readers:

• Email thread in which the contractor repeated asks to be paid full accrued Holiday Pay and JSA repeatedly refusing.
• Payslips showing “Holiday Accrual” and “Holiday Acc Employment Costs Reserve”
• The contractor’s Contract of Employment.
• The “Working with JSA” handbook that the contractor did receive stating “we ensure that all workers are paid both salary and holiday pay”.

There is so much damming evidence to analysis and dissect in what we have disclosed, it will jump of the pages to most of our readers. We have added some highlighting of the most relevant and interesting parts.

What happened to the contractor in question is, unfortunately, an all-too-common scenario. The most relevant parts include:

• He commenced employment with JSA on 29/06/2020.
• His employment with JSA ended on 18/12/2020.
• The JSA holiday year runs from 1^st October to 30^th September.
• The employment straddled two JSA holiday year periods.
• At the end of employment JSA did not automatically pay accrued Holiday Pay
• that he must take holiday leave to be paid his Holiday Pay.
• At no stage leading up to 01/10/2020 did JSA inform the contractor to take his holiday leave or risk losing his accrued Holiday Pay.
• JSA contractually require contractors to specifically request to be paid accrued Holiday Pay.
• Accrued Holiday Pay for the holiday year commencing on 01/10/2020 was only paid after the contractor realised he had not been paid it.
• Luckily the contractor asked for accrued Holiday Pay within 3-months of leaving his JSA employment.
• JSA have refused to pay accrued Holiday Pay for the holiday year ending 30/09/2020 because [they] “will not be able to process out his payment…as we [JSA] no longer have visibility of it” and “you cannot carry forward holiday pay from one year to the other”.
• Despite each payslip confirming a specific calculated amount for “Holiday Accrual” and “Holiday Acc Employment Costs Reserve”, JSA rely on unlawful contract terms to support the refusal to pay the contractor in full for accrued Holiday Pay entitlement.
• JSA has still not replied to the contractors last email sent on 03/12/2021.

The Court of Appeal in the case of Gary Smith V Pimlico Plumber Limited confirmed what the law had been for many years, so how did JSA get it so wrong? The answer is a simple one: greed at the expense of hard-working contractors.

The weight of the APPG getting behind the Holiday Pay issue is a huge step forward for the many thousands of contractors I have been fighting for, so now is the time for other bodies and organisations with an interest and stake in the temporary workforce sector to finally stand up and make their intentions known.