Almost every CFO in a new survey says their company can hire compliantly anywhere in the world. Almost every one of them has also already paid for getting it wrong, and more than a third are quietly hiring at home instead.
Key Takeaways
Ask a CFO whether their company can hire compliantly in another country, and eight in ten will say yes. Ask whether that company has ever paid for getting it wrong, and all ten will say yes to that too. A survey released this month puts a number on a contradiction HR teams have been living with for years: confidence in global hiring compliance is high, the actual record of compliance failures is worse, and a lot of finance leaders are responding by quietly pulling back rather than fixing the gap.
The survey, sponsored by Safeguard Global and published through HR Dive on September 21, polled 400 CFOs across the U.S. and U.K. and found near-universal appetite for international growth: 97% of CEOs surveyed said their company was interested in, investing in, or actively engaged in cross-border hiring. CFOs, for their part, expressed almost the same level of confidence in their ability to deliver on it. Eighty-three percent believed their company could compliantly hire in a new country without establishing a legal entity there, 83% felt confident managing the full mechanics of global hiring (contracts, payroll, taxes, benefits), and 83% were confident they could convert a contractor to a full-time employee without disrupting the business.
Then the same survey asked about outcomes rather than confidence, and the numbers reversed. Every CFO surveyed, 100%, said their organization had experienced a financial loss tied to noncompliance. Twenty-two percent put that loss at $1 million or more. And rather than closing the gap between confidence and cost, a large share of CFOs are simply hiring less internationally: 37% said they were prioritizing domestic hiring over international expansion or actively decreasing cross-border hiring, and only 22% of CFOs planned any global hiring at all in the next six months. Florence Cazemajou-Flint, CFO of Safeguard Global, is named in the report discussing what closes that gap, and the CFOs' own answers point the same direction: their top three requests were help with local contracts, payroll, and benefits; clearer country-specific compliance guidance; and faster onboarding capability.
Part of why "compliant today" is such a fragile claim is that the underlying rules keep changing in the middle of the hiring process. In the U.S., the Department of Labor proposed a new independent-contractor rule on February 26, 2026, that would rescind the 2024 standard and reinstate an economic-reality test weighted toward two factors, a worker's control over their own work and their opportunity for profit or loss, alongside three supporting factors covering skill, relationship permanence, and integration into the business. The public comment period closed April 28. Seven months later, no final rule has been issued, which means every company that classified a U.S. contractor under the current rule is hiring against a standard the department has already signaled it intends to replace.
Europe tells a similar story from the other direction: enforcement tightening rather than rules in flux. The Netherlands lifted its long-running moratorium on enforcing the DBA Act, the law governing whether a worker is a genuine contractor or a disguised employee, and began actively enforcing it again on January 1, 2025. On December 18, 2025, the Dutch government agreed to extend most of the transition period's "soft landing" provisions through the end of 2026, rather than letting them lapse as originally planned on January 1. But the exception matters: starting in 2026, authorities can already impose penalties, ranging from 10% to 100% of the additional tax assessed, in cases of demonstrable intent or gross negligence. A CFO who is 83% confident about compliance today is making that assessment against a U.S. rule still being rewritten and a European enforcement regime that has already resumed, with real penalties, for the worst offenders.
The CFOs surveyed already pointed at the fix without fully naming it: local contract and payroll support, country-specific compliance guidance, and faster onboarding are, in practice, the services an employer of record or global PEO exists to provide. The appeal isn't convenience, it's that the compliance burden the survey's confidence numbers assume away, tracking which of dozens of jurisdictions changed a classification test this quarter, gets absorbed by an organization whose entire business is keeping up with it.
The contractor-to-employee conversion point deserves its own scrutiny, because it's where compliance confidence and compensation reality collide hardest. Converting a contractor to an employee isn't just a legal status change, it resets the entire compensation structure: base pay, employer payroll tax contributions, statutory benefits, and often local minimum entitlements that a contractor invoice never had to account for. Eighty-three percent of CFOs say they can do that conversion without disruption. Given that 100% of the same group has already absorbed a compliance loss, and that neither the U.S. nor Dutch rules they're converting against are settled, that confidence number is the one most worth pressure-testing before it's tested by a regulator.
Confidence and competence aren't the same measurement, and this survey is unusually blunt about the distance between them. Eighty-three percent of CFOs believe they can hire the world compliantly. One hundred percent have already learned, at a cost, that believing it and doing it are two different things.
Guide
Built for the exact audience the CFO survey is describing: what executives need to know about the compliance landscape before confidence in global hiring gets tested by a real loss.
Download
Guide
The practical guide to the local contracts, payroll, and compliance support CFOs in the survey named as their top three unmet needs.
Download
Guide
A breakdown of how base pay, benefits, and statutory entitlements actually fit together, exactly what has to be rebuilt when a contractor converts to a full-time employee.
Download
Twenty-six Meta employees allege the company's AI layoff system penalized workers on medical and parental leave.
Governor Hochul signed S3460 giving employees a legal right to see and dispute their personnel file.
Starting October 1, New Jersey presumes every worker is an employee unless the business proves all three prongs of the ABC test.
