Should freelancers name and shame clients for overdue invoices?

By Fred Hicks, Senior Policy & Communications Adviser at IPSE - the self-employment association

Scrolling through LinkedIn recently, I’ve noticed something that you may have noticed too – more freelancers are publicly naming and shaming their clients for overdue invoices. Even tagging the companies responsible. It’s provocative, it’s public – and it’s becoming more common, on my feed at least.

So, what’s going on here? Is the freelance community feeling more empowered, or just more desperate?

As always, it’s complicated

As someone who campaigns against late payments, the quiet sense of admiration I feel in reading posts like these is quickly followed by sympathy and even discomfort.

The frustration behind the naming and shaming is entirely justified. Because when you’re a freelancer, an overdue invoice can easily cascade into a series of financial problems.

It can suddenly mean you’re unable to renew an important licence or qualification that you need for work; that means turning down work until it’s sorted; and that means opportunity cost and lower income… repeat this too many times and you can find yourself in debt, or just giving the freelance dream up altogether. All this, because a firm with a much bigger bank account couldn’t just get that couple of grand out the door on time.

When these are the stakes, you can see why freelancers are resorting to going public with the issue.

At IPSE, we regularly hear from freelancers whose invoices are ignored or endlessly delayed, for one reason or another. Some of them ask whether they should be naming and shaming the offending party. The impulse is understandable, and it’s clearly a line they’re reluctant to even consider crossing – because it’s not without risk.

Going public might prompt a long-overdue payment, but it can just as easily shut down dialogue altogether. It could prompt legal threats if the poster didn’t choose their words carefully. And it could put off prospective clients who see it as a red flag, regardless of the circumstances; that might be no great loss for some, but it could be detrimental to others.

Ultimately, the professional consequences are unpredictable, and that’s why IPSE has never recommended this approach to any individual who asks.

But when a client continuously delays, ignores and avoids paying money that a freelancer has earned and desperately needs, you can see why it feels like calling them out online is the only choice they have.

What’s most interesting to me is that it feels freelancers are talking less about late payment ‘culture’ in the abstract, and more about the individuals reputedly carrying it out.

Going by the book

Freelancers aren’t a homogenous group though, and there will be differing opinions on whether speaking out is the right thing to do. Following the debate online, some have highlighted the success they’ve had resolving payment issues in the Small Claims Court. That’s the official ‘last resort’, and there’s a specific procedure to follow, which we explain in our guide.

But instances of ‘speaking out’ indicate a lack of faith in the ‘official’ apparatus. That’s why we’ll keep pushing for stronger regulation, faster payments and better support. Our manifesto for the self-employed made a couple of recommendations to MPs:

• Legislate for obscenely long contractual payment terms of longer than 60 days to be deemed null and void, defaulting to a statutory maximum of 30 days – an approach recently taken in Belgium.
• Tighten official guidelines to clarify that an invoice becomes ‘active’ when the client receives it through whichever reasonable channel – and not when it is passed to a specific person or process.

Ultimately, we think the UK should be aiming for a standard commercial payment term of 30 days. The government’s Fair Payment Code is home to plenty of businesses who are up to that standard already, so it can be done.

A fair warning to clients

The traditional thinking has been that, in the world of business, things go wrong sometimes. Freelancers will have clients that treat them poorly – that’s business. But more freelancers seem to be pushing back on the idea that they should stay silent about it.

We’d never suggest that going public is the right option for everyone. Even I personally still don’t know about public call outs. But it’s happening. We’ve taken note, and clients should too: paying on time really is worth it. And when that can’t be done – because sometimes, things do just go wrong – then engaging in open, honest and proactive dialogue about the situation will go a long way to ease the tension.

But dialogue must be followed by action. Because when freelancers speak out, it’s not because they’re itching for a fight online – it’s because they’ve totally lost faith in what their client is telling them.