UPDATE - Setting the Record Straight

Update with full retraction from Schiff's office in Forbes story: 

“Our team had very productive staff-level meetings with Deel. Separately, the Congressman had a good meeting with the CEO when he visited DC that helped clear up the issues we raised in our letter,” a Schiff spokesperson wrote in an email to Forbes.

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Deel was founded to help millions of people work for the best companies in the world. In the last five years we’ve built a platform that makes global HR admin – compliance, onboarding, payroll, and immigration – a lot easier for employers and workers. We believe that the future of work is one where companies can easily break down global HR barriers to hire the most talented people, no matter where they live. 

Our mission is very much aligned with advocates and policymakers who want to protect workers. Compliance is what we do, successfully, with a team of 3,500 people in over 120 countries serving 25,000 customers and their hundreds of thousands of workers. As we say at Deel, since we have teams in 100+ countries, we “walk the walk” because we are our own most complex customer.

We've seen some inaccurate claims made against Deel. These allegations pit us against the hundreds of thousands of workers and employers we are trying to help navigate HR compliance and other complexities, so they can get jobs and grow their companies. We have strong reason to believe that a competitor likely seeded these claims, which is a sad state of affairs. Even though these allegations have already been retracted, we want to clear up any misunderstandings that exist about our business and its goals.  

Regarding the inaccuracies about our company - mainly, that we engage many US contractors improperly and advise our clients to do the same - here are the facts about the team engaging with or working for Deel internally:

• US contractors and vendors represent less than 1% of Deel’s overall workforce - 30 people. 
• Our worker base in the US is overwhelmingly made up of full-time employees - 400 FTEs in 2023.
• The average annualized contract value of Deel’s US contractors and vendors is $134,000.
• Our business model and mission is completely at odds with advising clients to engage contractors improperly: we do the contrary, and we earn way less when employers engage contractors vs. when they hire employees through our platform. 
• We have over 100 compliance experts in-house in 120+ countries. 
• We created the Deel Lab for Global Employment with the very purpose of studying and helping prevent worker misclassification practices, in collaboration with institutions like Queen’s and Cornell Universities. Given how much the way people work has changed over the past few years, we want to collaborate more with academia and policymakers about our growing industry.

Over 500,000 workers around the world depend on Deel to work for amazing companies, get paid well, receive great benefits, and achieve economic empowerment as a result. Workers like Alba, who landed a dream marketing job without having to move away from her family, or David, a web developer in Mexico City who doubled his income working for a US company. 

We’re making great progress on unlocking job opportunities for more and more people around the world, shipping innovative products to help simplify HR, and engaging on key policy topics that will shape the future of global employment. Our promise is to give workers and companies the best HR experience possible. We’re not going to let false claims get in the way of delivering on that promise.