The four places US employment risk hides for European companies

Nothing looks wrong. Then an audit, a raise, or a diligence process goes looking, and it finds the same four things every time.

A European company that starts generating revenue in the United States picks up obligations that do not exist at home. Almost none of them announce themselves. They accumulate quietly through ad hoc practice and surface at the least convenient moment, priced as a finding rather than a fix.

After enough of these, the same four places come up every time.

Worker classification

The first US hires are often contractors, because contractors are easy. Then the contractor gets a company email address, a manager, set hours and a laptop. At that point, under both federal and state tests, they may be an employee whether or not the contract says so.

The exposure is retroactive. Back taxes, back benefits, penalties, and in some states a private right of action. It compounds quietly for as long as nobody looks, and the first person to look is usually the contractor's lawyer or a state agency.

State by state compliance

There is no single US employment law. There are fifty of them, plus federal, plus cities. Wage and hour rules, mandatory leave, final pay timing, required notices, pay transparency in job postings, non-compete enforceability: every one of these has a different answer depending on where the employee sits.

A company with staff in California, New York and Texas is effectively running three employment regimes. Most European companies run one, the one their first US hire happened to be in, and apply it everywhere.

Benefits that were set up once

Benefits were chosen when there were four employees, by a founder or an office manager who has since moved on. Nobody has reviewed the plan against headcount, against the states now in play, or against what a competitor offers. Contribution rules drift. Eligibility gets applied inconsistently. An employee in one state is getting something an employee in another is not, and there is no documented reason.

This one rarely causes a crisis on its own. It causes a finding in diligence and a difficult conversation in a retention negotiation.

Organizational gaps

No handbook. No documented policy. No performance record on the manager who is about to be let go. Offer letters that promise things the company did not mean to promise. IP assignment language that was copied from a European template and does not work in the US.

All of it is fine until the first termination or the first raise. Then it is the entire conversation.

What to do with this

None of these four require a large HR department to fix. They require someone to look, in order, with a scorecard, before someone else looks first. That is what a risk scan is. The output is a red, yellow and green picture per company, and a path from there.