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Models
Nominee employer
Nominee employer is a person or shell that signs as employer while someone else runs the relationship. It is a filing fiction. It fails when a worker or an agency looks behind the name.
Also called name-only employer
How it works
Somewhere in the stack a relative, a fixer, or a ₱50,000 company appears on the SSS number. You pay a founder in California. The nominee cannot explain the role, cannot run twin-notice, and cannot pay thirteenth month without asking you for the cash the same day. DO 174-17 and the four-fold test will not stop at the signature block. Joint liability is the likely shape of the result.
Example: a ‘local partner’ employs your three hires on paper for a 5% markup and forwards every HR question to you. A wage complaint names both of you. The markup was not insurance.
How it differs
A real EOR has staff, capital, and files. A nominee has a signature. An entity you own is the clean version of putting a name on the file.
Common errors
Paying a friend in Makati to ‘be the employer’ so you can move fast.
In practice
Treat Nominee employer as a week-one operating object. Name the employer on the contract and the manager in Slack. If those two names cannot both be true at once, the model is theater. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have nominee employer yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.