Legal Advice for Self-Employed Persons

Questioner

Hello I am a self-employed person and had accepted a job for which I had hired several self-employed people. Now one of them had damaged a stove with an aerial platform and this cost +/- 3000 euros. Now my client refuses to pay me and demands a credit note from me to cover the damage. However, I am insured, but they keep insisting on a credit note and stating that I have to submit it to my insurance company. Do I have to do that too?

Lawyer

The costs you owe are either the current value of the stove or the reasonable repair costs of this stove. You are not obliged to have the matter reimbursed by your insurer, but you will have to compensate your client. Your client must pay you the amount owed minus the compensation he can claim from you. If you do not actually agree with the amount of damages that your client is claiming, it is probably wise to report this matter to your insurer and let your insurer determine what damage must be compensated.

Questioner

But if I make a credit note, I am no longer entitled to that amount, right? And will insurers agree to pay out credit notes, because my client states that this is the case?

Lawyer

If you give a credit note to your client, he does not have to pay that amount. You are then indeed no longer entitled to that money from your client. In my opinion, it does not matter from an insurance point of view whether you pay money to the other party or in fact by offsetting, because that is what you do when you make a credit note, compensating the damage. All this provided that the credit note shows that it was written as compensation for the damage to the stove. If you are insured, I would advise you to report the damage there now. Insurers usually require that you report damage to them immediately. You do not need a credit note to report it.

Lawyer

Robert is right. Your liability insurance has you covered for these types of cases in which you are liable for damage caused, a credit note does not add or subtract anything. The only difference is that if you have already compensated your customer, the amount of the damage will be paid to you and not directly to your customer. But if you want to be sure that nothing goes wrong from an insurance perspective, you can simply call your insurer, explain the problem and ask how you can best deal with it. Then nothing can go wrong. And you can always decide afterwards whether or not to submit the damage to your insurer.

Questioner

First of all I would like to thank you for the advice. I had also reported the incident to the union. However, they discovered that the company that had suffered the damage had never claimed the damage from my client but had already resolved it through their own insurance. That is why my client kept insisting on a credit note, so I could whistle for the money. Can I also report this incident somewhere so that this cannot happen to others?