Clients are running back to where they fled from: How OneXRM is solving the IR35 crisis for contractors
With umbrella companies facing a reckoning, blanket bans costing businesses dearly, and mass redundancies pushing thousands towards contracting, Paul Rossiter of OneXRM speaks to The Freelance Informer about the many factors putting the UK’s contractor market at a crossroads — and what he sees as the solution for the entire contractor supply chain
For years, the UK’s contracting sector has operated on a fundamental flaw whereby the contract is treated as the finish line, not the starting gun. Once signed, scope creep sets in, change notes pile up, and disputes become inevitable. Paul Rossiter, founder of OneXRM, has spent the better part of a decade trying to fix that.
Having worked across IT, manufacturing, and operations — including large-scale SAP and infrastructure projects — Rossiter saw the same dysfunction from both sides of the table.
“Every single time that you engage a contractor, either as a client or working as a contractor,” he explains, “the system’s just not set up or configured for it.”
The result, he observed, is a contracting ecosystem that hands off a signed document and then expresses surprise when costs escalate or deliverables are missed.
“None of that is actually documented or controlled post-signature,” he says, leaving clients telling contractors down the line, for example, ‘We agreed it was 100 grand, and now it’s 150 grand. What happened between us signing that document and you completing the contract?’
This frustration led Rossiter to build OneXRM. It’s not as a marketplace or a recruiter, but what he says is a pure contracting toolset that allows any entity, whether a freelance consultant, an events company, or a large enterprise, to create, manage, and evidence contracts on their own terms.
Not a marketplace, but a contract management platform
Unlike the household names in the freelance platform space — Upwork, Toptal, Fiverr and the like, OneXRM claims it does not sit in the middle of transactions, processing payments or taking a cut. It is, as Rossiter is emphatic in pointing out, something entirely different.
We’re not a payment processor, we’re not a recruiter, we’re not a marketplace. We’re purely a contracting toolset that allows anybody to create an account, connect with any client, and create the contracts they want on their terms.
The platform operates on a two-tier contract structure: a Master Service Agreement (MSA) between the parties, which sets out payment terms and overarching conditions, sits above individual Statements of Work (SOWs). A contractor can use OneXRM’s default MSA template — including standard 30-day payment terms — if the client has nothing in place, or the client can issue their own. Underneath that, each piece of work is governed by a discrete SOW.
However, the platform doesn’t just cover the moment of signature. When a contract is active, both parties continue to use it, tracking performance, submitting timesheets, and approving payments — all within the same system.
For example, if additional days are needed within scope, a contingency can be applied with a written rationale. If the scope genuinely changes, a new version of the document is created, preserving the original.
“You don’t have this series of change notes,” says Rossiter. “Everybody sees it. And if that contract — if HMRC come along — there’s a reason why that additional payment took place.”
The IR35 audit trail clients don’t know they need
One of OneXRM’s most operationally significant features is its built-in IR35 support — specifically the Status Determination Statement (SDS) process and the evidence chain it creates for outside-IR35 engagements.
Since the off-payroll working rules were extended to the private sector in April 2021, many larger organisations responded with blanket bans on limited company contractors, effectively pushing everyone inside IR35 or through umbrella companies. Rossiter is sympathetic to the fear that drove those decisions but argues the response was disproportionate — and, increasingly, unaffordable.
Clients are probably looking at completely outsourcing their tech departments away from the UK, which is a massive problem. Once they start doing that, all those funds are now going abroad. It’s a proper problem from an HR perspective.
For organisations that have tried to sidestep IR35 risk by fully outsourcing to consultancies, Rossiter has a warning: the arrangement only holds if the contractor is genuinely managed at arm’s length by the consultancy, not embedded in the client’s own team.
“That contracted-out service is dependent on that worker not being embedded within the organisation,” he explains. “If that consultancy contractor turns up on a client site and becomes involved in a client team — that’s not a fully contracted-out service. HMRC’s first question is: let’s see your SDS. If you haven’t got one, that’s a nice fine for you.”
OneXRM holds the full audit trail — including all contract versions, approvals, and communications — for six years, in line with HMRC requirements. The platform’s evidence chain has already been tested in practice.
We’ve never had to go further than responding to an HMRC inquiry. It took us an hour to get all of that information together. It’s held within the system. The whole audit trail is within the system.
What contractors are actually losing under Inside IR35
The debate around inside versus outside IR35 is often reduced to a headline tax rate comparison. Rossiter argues this misses the deeper financial reality for limited company contractors.
The most visible losses are the pre-tax benefits that limited companies can run through the business — an electric car, technology costs, professional subscriptions — all of which disappear the moment a worker is deemed inside IR35. But the less discussed issue, he says, is the loss of financial resilience.
If you’re a well-paid contractor, you only draw down what you need. Those reserves stay in the company and don’t get taxed until you draw them out. Under an inside contract, everything you get is taxed at source.
So, when that contract ends, you’ve got no backstop.
This is, he argues, contrary to the flexibility that makes contracting valuable to both parties. Clients want agile, outcome-based engagements. Contractors want the autonomy to manage their own tax position across periods of work and and in between assignments or projects. Inside IR35, both sides lose something.
That said, Rossiter does not advocate rigidity. For contractors who have held out exclusively for outside engagements, he urges an amount of pragmatism.
“Being stubborn isn’t always going to be the right answer. If you are going to be working remotely, I would say the balance between inside and outside is now almost on a parity. But if you have to travel to a client location regularly and you want to offset those travel expenses, then outside is more favourable.”
Umbrella companies: A cull is coming
April 2026 brings new joint liability provisions under the umbrella company reforms, placing greater risk on the supply chain. Rossiter believes this will accelerate a long-overdue contraction in the umbrella market:
Umbrellas have been able to suck money out of the system by doing very little other than processing payments and skimming off the top. I think there’ll be a lot of closures. They won’t be able to survive without those extra kickbacks.
He notes that some umbrella operators are already looking at diversifying, even exploring what companies like OneXRM have built, but suggests they are too far behind the curve to replicate it quickly. More broadly, he predicts that organisations which fled from limited company contractors into umbrellas will find the new regulatory environment just as uncomfortable.
“If they choose an umbrella, they’ve got to be even more careful because now they have joint liability. That’s just another headache.”
The recruiters who have positioned themselves as de facto compliance advisers are also in his sights. “A lot of organisations rely on recruiters to tell them what the legislation is about. And they honestly haven’t got a clue what their risk exposure is. Most of them are telling clients: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take the liability.’ That’s a big liability to take on board.”
Clients want to keep contractor hiring costs down
Client cost awareness is rising, says Rossiter. “Clients are obviously cost aware at the moment, because everything has gone up substantially — taxation, engagements, everything else. So, they want to find savings.”
He continues, “The easiest way for them to find savings is to have an infrastructure that helps bring those costs down — engage contractors outside IR35 at a rate satisfactory for the contractor and still be saving money.”
He suggests clients must get rid of outdated mindsets when it comes to hiring contractors:
When off-payroll compliance came in, all the big organisations just ran away — go inside IR35, go through consultancy. Five years later, consultancy is really expensive, inside IR35 is costly too, and now there’s additional risk. The only place they can really go is back to where they ran from.
“They need to open their eyes up a little bit more, because things have moved on from five years ago when they made that blanket ban.”
“They can’t really negotiate on price anymore. They’ve got two choices: go back to where they came from or outsource the entire department abroad. And that’s political suicide.”
Rossier also suggests offshoring is a false economy: “It looks great on paper — half the cost. But it takes three times as long. Where’s the saving?
Advice for contractors
For the contractors themselves — many of whom are now worried about a job market also absorbing waves of redundancies from tech and other sectors — Rossiter’s counsel is practical and pointed.
“The biggest mistake contractors make is trying to get too involved in the decision-making process when they can’t influence it. They can’t overturn a blanket ban. For all their shouting and screaming, it’s not going to make much difference.”
Instead, he urges contractors to look inward: to adopt the processes and toolsets that help them demonstrate their outside-IR35 legitimacy compliantly and confidently, rather than relitigating a fight they cannot win.
“Things do change, and you have to accept that,” he says. “There may be some additional governance hoops to jump through, but if those hoops mean you still get the outside engagement, that’s just part of the cycle.”
As for the broader trajectory of the market — with agentic AI workflows reducing the justification for permanent hires, mass redundancies feeding the contractor talent pool, and offshore outsourcing threatening to hollow out UK tech delivery — Rossiter sees both urgency and opportunity.
“Organisations want outcome-based engagements, which align with how outside contracts should be. They just haven’t got the infrastructure to support it. That’s what we’re trying to change.”
Paul Rossiter is co-founder of OneXRM, a contract lifecycle management platform for contractors and clients. OneXRM completed its R&D phase in 2024 and is now scaling commercially.
