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Old 10th Jan 2015, 08:22
  #7 (permalink)  
Capot
 
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Europe
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Use the larger, well-established, properly financed agencies, and avoid those who neither understand nor care about tax issues in other EU countries, which is about half of them, and have not followed the laws of those countries, which could leave you and/or their clients in deep dodo. (And use a good accountant, who specialises in contractors.) Germany, Italy, The Netherlands are good examples of places with tricky tax regimes.

Their consultants will still be untrustworthy, but less so than than those on commission only with small, new and poorly financed ones. And they are less likely to renege on payments due to you because they have not got cash reserves when their clients pay late, as they always will. And they get the most requests from clients.

Have a good, concise CV ready, with copies of all your relevant certs as PDF's in a single file. Make sure your mandatory certs have at least 3 months remaining validity. (HF, EWIS, FTS; do them online to save money, go to Aviation Job Search for a selection of suppliers.).

Good Luck! As people have said, if you can stay permy you should, contracting is not the nirvana it seems to be when you are permy. But if it suits you for other reasons, it's not all bad. Above all, keep your own counsel in a client's hangar; don't do anything illegal, but accept that you are expected to give top value.

If you are certifying in third world banana republics like Greece, make sure you know what happened in that Greek/Cypriot B737 crash a few years ago, Helios flight 522 October 2006, and the disgraceful, shameful behaviour of the so-called judicial system in Greece where the search for a scapegoat, any scapegoat, preferably foreign, with no attempt to understand the technical facts, led to dreadful injustice for the entirely innocent certifying LAME, a contractor called Alan Irwin. The equally shameful, abject, cowardly refusal (inability?) of the UK CAA to defend robustly not only the individual but the integrity of a UK CAA-issued licence was a lesson to us all in how low that organisation has sunk.

Last edited by Capot; 10th Jan 2015 at 15:26.
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