Why I Built EORwatch – And What the EOR Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

By Ingmar Booij, Founder – EORwatch

I have been working in international employment and corporate services since 1991. I spent twenty years at TMF Group, one of the world’s leading trust and corporate services firms, rising from accountant to Member of the Group Board of Directors. My first encounter with what would later become known as Employer of Record services came in 1992, when I became Managing Director of a major UK manufacturing group’s overseas operations – a genuine substance role, requiring real local directorship and presence across multiple jurisdictions.

When I left TMF in 2011, the EOR industry was in its infancy. The early players were contractor service providers – companies helping businesses manage their international workforce compliantly. Among the pioneers were people like Tim Burgess and Duncan Macintosh at Shield GEO, and Ben Wright at Velocity Global. These were honest operators building something genuinely new and valuable.

What many people don’t know is how those early EOR companies actually delivered their services. They didn’t have entity networks yet. They couldn’t. Building compliant legal entities across dozens of countries takes years. So they did what any sensible startup does – they outsourced. They came to companies like mine, GOT International, and a handful of others, and asked us to provide the local entity management, payroll processing, and employment administration they couldn’t yet do themselves.

We built their networks for them. We employed their clients’ workers. We handled the compliance, the payroll, the local HR issues, the terminations – all the difficult, unglamorous work that made their promises to clients possible.

And when they had enough volume, they brought it in-house. Tim, Duncan and Ben did this honestly – with fair notice, transparent timelines, and genuine respect for the relationships we had built. That is how a healthy industry should work.

But not everyone followed their example.

As the industry grew, a second wave of EOR providers emerged. Faster, more aggressive, better funded, and – in too many cases – far less scrupulous. The business model was the same. The values were not.

The pattern was always the same. Providers would oversell their capabilities to clients. Hire today, fire today – legally impossible in most jurisdictions, but promised anyway by sales teams with no understanding of local employment law. When clients discovered the reality, subcontractors like us were blamed. Invoices went unpaid or were disputed on spurious grounds. We were pressured to terminate employees in ways that violated local legislation – and in some cases, our own ethical principles – because the EOR provider needed to keep a much larger global client satisfied.

The costs fell on us. The relationships we had built with local employees, with tax authorities, with labour courts – all of that was our problem. The revenue and the client relationship belonged to them.

I founded GOT International to provide a genuinely professional subcontracting service to the EOR industry. For years we did exactly that, across multiple countries and continents. We were good at it. We were honest. We paid our employees on time, every time, even when we hadn’t been paid ourselves – until the unpaid invoices accumulated to the point where we could no longer sustain it.

In 2025, GOT International ceased trading. The immediate cause was the failure of not one, but three major EOR providers to honour their payment obligations to us – obligations that were documented, across multiple countries, and not in dispute on the merits. The combined unpaid amount represented more than three years of management fees. We pursued legal remedies. We lost – not because we were wrong, but because we ran out of money to fight. When we finally ran out of resources entirely, we were forced to disappoint the very employees we had always prioritised – the people we had paid on time, every time, even when we ourselves hadn’t been paid. That is perhaps the hardest part of this story to tell.

That is how this industry destroys the people it depends on.

The EOR industry provides a genuinely valuable service. The ability for a company in the Netherlands to employ someone in Kenya, or for a startup in the US to hire talent in Poland without establishing a local entity – that is real value, and it benefits businesses, workers, and economies.

But greed and dishonesty lead to less optimal outcomes for everyone involved. Employees who don’t get paid on time. Clients who were oversold and underdelivered. Suppliers who are squeezed. Subcontractors who are used, then discarded, then destroyed.

EORwatch exists because the people most affected by these failures had nowhere to share their experiences. No platform where a subcontractor in Nigeria could warn others about a provider that doesn’t pay. No place where an HR director could read honest reviews before signing a three-year contract. No voice for the employees placed through EOR providers who had no idea what their rights were or who was actually responsible for them.

That changes now.

If you have worked with an EOR provider – as an employee, a client, a supplier, or a subcontractor – your experience matters. The good and the bad. The providers who got it right and the ones who didn’t.

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