DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Law and Practice Contributed by: Carlos Hernández Contreras, Hernández Contreras & Herrera
nominal, ie, it does not offer you insurance coverage. However, it allows the company to place you on the payroll and to consider you, from now on, as an employee. In this case, it is advisable to contact an insurance broker to open a health insurance and an occupational accident insurance, with coverage until you obtain your residency card. (b) The other alternative that is being used in practice is to pay the person as if he/she were an independent professional, withholding the taxes that correspond to that category, with two exceptions: (i) that as soon as he/she gets his/her resi - dence card, he/she must be affiliated with the TSS as an employee; and (ii) in his/her seniority as noted in the contract of employment, the time he/she was paid as an independent professional must be included. (c) The first option is more orthodox, although the second option saves on insurance. (d) On the other hand, if the foreign worker does not yet have a Dominican cédula (national identity card) but possesses one of these three documents: work visa; migration card; or regu - larisation card issued by the Ministry of Interior and Police – a request for assignment of Social Security Number (NSS) can be made through the Single System of Information and Collec - tion (SUIR), following the instructions and steps indicated in the portal. • If by chance the foreigner entered the country only with a tourist visa (without being in possession of the NM1 visa, which means that a job offer has already been made) it is convenient to agree with the foreign employee a break (at Easter, Christmas/ end of the year, or another period of the year) to return to his/her country, and visit the Dominican Embassy, filling out the NM1 Visa Application Form, with the basic documentation (passport, birth certificate, certification of non-criminal record, SIRLA certification of the employer in the DR, and letter of offer of employment in the DR). And upon returning to the DR, you must complete all the paperwork at the General Directorate of Migration and Ministry of Labor, and in about four months, approximately, you will already have a residence or
work visa, and you will be able to contribute to the TSS and be paid as an employee at the DGII. • It must be taken into account that, according to the case law, the illegal status of the foreign employee does not prevent him/her from having the same rights and exercising the same legal actions as a Dominican employee. Given these circumstances, it is advisable to sign a contract agreeing all of the above as “provisional conditions” until the work visa is obtained. This would allow to cover the employer in case of a claim by the foreigner himself/herself (which has already happened) who, despite being aware of having been hired without a work visa – and so accepted it – then alleges dam - ages for not being affiliated to the Social Security. According to the case law, the lack of affiliation to the TSS when the conditions and mechanisms indispensable for such obligation are not present, exempts the employer from liability, since “no one is obliged to the impossible”. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, teleworking or remote working has proliferated in the country, and generally the parties freely agree on two or three days a week of remote working; other times, the par - ties agree on a longer period (three or four weeks) of remote working. In such cases, the employee could be working from home, from an airport, or from a hotel, interchangeably. At the same time, the Ministry of Labor issued a reso - lution intended to regulate teleworking, but it has not been widely accepted, and no one is complying with it. It is too rigid: it is designed for teleworking only from the employee’s home, and it has numerous require - ments, such as a written agreement, registration with the Ministry of Labor, and many other impractical con - ditions. As a result, since it was created in Novem - ber 2020, no one has complied with it. Companies and workers have continued to apply teleworking as described above, regardless of the resolution. 5. New Work 5.1 Mobile Work On the other hand, it is important to note that remote work agreements outside the scope of the Ministry of
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