John Jonas (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, Ep. 172) explains how he reimburses online Filipino specialists for PhilHealth, SSS, and private health insurance. Because he lacks a Philippine legal entity, he has employees pay their own contributions, submit receipts (or transaction-history screenshots), and then reimburses them. He emphasizes verifying payments via receipts to avoid sending extra money, notes PhilHealth lowers hospital bills and SSS affects loans and pensions, and says average combined cost is about $1,000/year to be discussed in a future episode.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists. This is episode 172, reimbursing your online Filipino specialists for health insurance, PhilHealth and SSS. So what I'm about to say is completely optional for you, but it's also really good. It's something that we do, but we didn't do it. For the first number of years we had people working for us in the Philippines. So I give my workers at onlinejobs ph. Additional pay for their insurance premiums and I pay for their PhilHealth, I pay for their health insurance, and I pay for their sss, which is the Filipino is not insurance premium, but it's the Filipino version of Social Security. So because I don't have an entity in the Philippines, I don't have a business, I don't have an llc, I don't have an office, I don't have any of that in the Philippines. I can't make contributions to these things directly. So what we have to do is pay the money to our workers and then they use it to pay for the services that they're buying. And actually, that's not exactly how we do it. So we have them pay for things, get a receipt and submit that receipt to us, and then we reimburse them for it. Otherwise, you're just sending extra money. And how do you know that they actually paid for it and it's just not the best way to do it? So we have them pay for it first and then we reimburse them later. Most Filipinos are honest and you won't have a problem with this, but, you know, they'll still be happy to get you the receipts that for things that they've paid for so you can reimburse them. If they send bogus receipts, then, well, you know, they're just cheating themselves. Especially, I mean, PhilHealth when you get sick. PhilHealth is. Is helpful to them in decreasing their hospital bills, which is a big deal. And then sss, man, you're cheating yourself out of that because if you haven't paid, it affects your ability to get a loan from the government and it affects your pension down the road. Yeah, they want to pay their PhilHealth and their SSS health insurance premium is a different story. That's a private thing that we take care of on our own on the side. I will talk about that more in a coming episode. If they didn't get a receipt for the things that they paid for, you can ask them for their transaction history. Filipinos can access their transaction history for their PhilHealth and their SSS Online. They can get a record of it. They can send you it. They can send you the screenshot. It's totally reasonable if they forgot to get a receipt or didn't get a receipt for the payments that they made. Also, in a future episode, I will talk about the average cost of all these things per year, just so you know, so you have an idea of if you can do this with your team or not. It's about a thousand dollars a year for the average cost of these things.
