Can a sole-proprietor be his own employee?

Can a sole-proprietor be his own employee?
A sole proprietor (i.e, the sole owner of an unincorporated business) cannot be his own employee. He can be an employer if he has other people working for him as employees, but he cannot be his own employee for legal or tax purposes.


The sole proprietorship is the simplest form of business organization. A sole proprietorship comes into existence when a single person starts to carry on business on his own, without taking steps to adopt another form of organization, such as a corporation. If you agree to cut your neighbour's grass for money each week, you are carrying on business as a sole proprietor.


A sole proprietor could enter into a contract to employ someone else to cut your grass. But he cannot "employ himself" to do so.


Although a sole proprietor who has employees may set himself up on the payroll with his employees solely for the convenience of regularly "paying" himself, and for automatic record keeping and direct-deposit purposes, that does not make him an employee. He is still the owner of the business, and may not deduct any "compensation" he "paid" to himself as business expenses. If he does so, he should set himself up in a separate department by himself for payroll reporting purposes, so that it is easy to keep amounts paid to him separate from the amounts paid to his employees.