Monotributo Fraud: The Legal Framework of Disguised Employment

Invoicing under Argentina's simplified self-employment tax regime ('monotributo') for what is, in practice, your only employer does not make you an independent professional. If subordination — legal, technical, and economic — is present, an employment relationship exists, invoices or not. Since the 2024 reform, you can no longer rely on the automatic presumption in Art. 23 LCT: you have to prove those signs directly.

1. The Art. 23 LCT presumption and what the reform changed

The starting point is still the same: Art. 14 LCT, which was not amended, voids any contract in which the parties acted through simulation or fraud against labor law, whether by disguising it as a non-labor arrangement or by any other means. When that happens, the relationship is governed by the LCT regardless of what the parties called it. This is the basis of the primacy of reality principle: what matters is what actually happened, not the label the parties put on it.

For decades, that principle relied on a very powerful procedural tool: the presumption in Art. 23 LCT, which states that simply performing services in a situation of dependency triggers a presumption that an employment contract exists, unless proven otherwise. Proving that you rendered the service was enough to shift the burden of proof onto the employer.

Regulatory Decree 847/2024 (Annex II, Art. 3) added an important detail: this rule applies regardless of the number of invoices issued or the number of clients you have. In other words, even invoicing a single company exclusively does not, by itself, reactivate the legal presumption in Art. 23.

None of this means monotributo fraud has stopped existing as a legal category, or that you have lost your right to claim. It means what you have to prove has changed: proving that you rendered the service is no longer enough to trigger the presumption in your favor. You have to affirmatively prove, with concrete evidence, that the signs of a genuine employment relationship were present — covered in the next section — relying on the primacy of reality principle and the nullity-for-fraud rule in Art. 14 LCT, which remains fully in force.

2. What signs prove dependency behind the invoices

Without the automatic presumption, legal scholarship and case law still rely on the same elements to tell a genuine independent-services arrangement apart from an employment contract. The more of these signs you can stack up, the stronger your case:

• Legal subordination: you are subject to the instructions, control, and disciplinary power of whoever hires you, just like an employee in a dependent relationship.
• Technical subordination: you do not decide the means, timing, or methods of the work; the other party sets them and also supplies the tools.
• Economic subordination: your monthly income functions as a disguised salary — a fixed or near-fixed, periodic amount — rather than the price of a specific outcome freely negotiated.
• Integration into someone else's organization: you are part of the company's productive structure, with a corporate email account, reporting to a supervisor, or a place in its org chart, rather than operating as an outside third party.
• Continuity and regularity: the work extends over time on an ongoing basis, rather than being limited to a specific, bounded project or task.
• No business risk of your own: you get paid regardless of the company's economic results, without bearing the risk that a genuinely independent contractor assumes.

None of these signs is decisive on its own. Judges weigh them together, aided by so-called judicial or "hominis" presumptions (Art. 163(5) of the Federal Code of Civil and Commercial Procedure), which remain available even when the specific legal presumption in Art. 23 LCT does not apply.

3. Step by step to claim recognition of an employment relationship

1. Gather evidence of the signs of dependency before you act: emails or messages with instructions, required schedules, tools provided by the company, proof that payment was periodic and of a fixed amount, and anything showing your integration into the organization.
2. Send a free labor telegram (Law 23,789) demanding proper registration of the relationship, with your real start date and real pay. See how to send a free labor telegram.
3. If the company rejects the claim or does not respond, consider constructive dismissal based on the breach under Arts. 242 and 246 LCT.
4. Start the mandatory pre-trial SECLO proceeding (Law 24,635) before filing suit. See how mandatory conciliation works.
5. If there is no settlement, file suit offering all the evidence of the signs of dependency you gathered, without relying on the Art. 23 LCT presumption.

If the courts recognize the employment relationship, the items you can actually claim are seniority severance pay (Art. 245 LCT), payment in lieu of notice and integration of the dismissal month (Arts. 232 and 233 LCT), and unpaid 13th-month bonus (SAC) and vacation pay for the period not yet time-barred, within the two years set by Art. 256 LCT. As for social-security contributions, Art. 7° quáter of Law 24,013 — added by Law 27,742 — provides that if a final judgment determines that a relationship structured as a services or works contract was in fact an employment relationship, the debt determined by the collecting agency is calculated after deducting the amounts already paid under the monotributo regime.

4. Common mistakes when building the claim

• Assuming that invoicing automatically triggers the Art. 23 LCT presumption. Since the 2024 reform, it does not: you have to prove the signs of dependency directly.
• Resting the claim solely on exclusivity to one client. Invoicing a single company is a strong sign, but it is not enough on its own without other elements of legal, technical, or economic subordination.
• Claiming fines that no longer exist. Including the repealed fines under Law 24,013 or Law 25,323 in a claim weakens it and sets the wrong expectations about the final amount.
• Stopping invoicing before gathering evidence. Cutting the formal relationship too soon, before you have collected the necessary signs, makes it harder to later reconstruct the real relationship.
• Not distinguishing your general situation from a single-client invoicing claim. If that is exactly your case, it is worth working directly with the guide on monotributo fraud and exclusive invoicing, which is more specific to that scenario.

Frequently Asked Questions