Conscientious objection

Employers and employees can have conscientious objections to the national insurances and/or employee insurances. Employers or employees are only recognised as a conscientious objector in the following situations:

• They have a statement from the ‘Sociale Verzekeringsbank’: the employer or employee that has conscientious objections to the national insurances can submit a request for recognition as conscientious objector to the regional office of the ‘Sociale Verzekeringsbank’.
• They have a statement from the ‘UWV’: the employer or employee that has conscientious objections to the employee insurances can submit a request for recognition as conscientious objector to the ‘UWV’.

If an employer or employee has a statement from the ‘Sociale Verzekeringsbank’ or the ‘UWV’, special regulations apply to withholdings from wages. The following four situations can occur:

• The employee has conscientious objections to the national insurances
• The employee has conscientious objections to the employee insurances
• The employer has conscientious objections to the national insurances
• The employer has conscientious objections to the employee insurances

The employee has conscientious objections to the national insurances

If an employee has been recognised by the ‘Sociale Verzekeringsbank’ as a conscientious objector, as the taxpayer you must withhold wage tax as a replacement for the national insurance contributions. The replacement wage tax is equal to the national insurance contributions it replaces. That means you can use the amount indicated in the wage tax/national insurance contributions table that applies to the employee.

The Digital annual statement (Profit) and Digital annual statement of salary indicator (Profit) reports take this situation into account.

The employee has conscientious objections to the employee insurances

If an employee has been recognised as a conscientious objector by the ‘UWV’, you are not allowed to withhold contributions to the premiums for these insurances from the wage of this employee.

However, you are obliged to pay the employer share of the premiums for the ‘ZFW’ (health insurance law) and ‘WW’ (unemployment law). Because the employee that is recognised as a conscientious objector, is not entitled to any benefits based on the ‘ZFW’, the employer share of the ‘ZFW’ premium does not have to be added to the wage.

Additional information can be obtained from the ‘UWV’.

The employer has conscientious objections to the national insurances

If you, as the employer, have been recognised as conscientious objector by the ‘Sociale Verzekeringsbank’, instead of withholding the national insurance contributions you have to withhold a replacement wage tax from the wage of all your employees. The replacement wage tax is equal to the national insurance contributions it replaces.

On the wage tax/national insurance contributions declaration, you use the text ‘Wage tax/wage tax as replacement for contribution’ instead of ‘Wage tax/national insurance contributions’.

The employer has conscientious objections to the employee insurances

If you, as the employer, have been recognised as a conscientious objector by the ‘UWV’, you may be exempted from certain obligations. In that case, the tax authority will impose extra ‘Loonheffing’ after the end of the year. This extra tax is equal to the premium amount that you would have had to pay over the past year.

Configure an employee

For employees with conscientious objections, the following two options are available:

• Conscientious objections to the employee insurances
• Conscientious objections to the national insurances

If 'Conscientious objections to the employee insurances' applies, or if both options apply, you specify this at the agency level of the tax authority on the Agency tab of the employee properties.

If only ‘Conscientious objections to the national insurances' applies, you do not specify this in Profit. After all, this does not affect the wage calculation. If you still want to register it for your own information, you can choose to create a custom tab at the employee level and use it to indicate that the employee has conscientious objections to the national insurance contributions.