Yesterday I got an email with the title: "URGENT: Invitation from Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology". I was flattered to learn from Vanessa, that the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology is interested that I will review some project proposal in the area of P2P networks.
So far nothing bizarre here. I continued reading and I got to the compensation part. I was glad to learn that "Furthermore, FCT pays € 70 per proposal evaluated, from which a tax deduction will be applied as required by Portuguese law." There was also an attached link with a 22 page tutorial on how to rate proposals.
The email was sent on Thursday night. I need to return an answer until Sunday if I am willing to rate the proposal. I am almost certain Vanessa does not work on weekends.
Any of my blog readers is Portugese? Let be conservative and assume assume there is 20% tax. We remain with 56 Euro. Which are 72$. Further assume I need one hour to read the proposal ratings guidelines and three hours to read and rate the proposal. So we are talking about 18$ an hour gig!
Now, let's be more realistic. Depositing a check in Euro and converting the money will cost probably 20$ fee. So we remain with 52$ gig. Reporting a foreign income in end of your tax report will result in overhead of at least 50$ for the accountants. So we remain with a 2$ fee for 4 hours of work.
And now I ask Vanessa. Are you serious? Why don't you ask me to volunteer to review your proposal? It will be much cheaper for me.. :-)
I asked Vanessa to find out what is the applied tax. It may be that the income tax is lower than 20%. In that case all my calculations are wrong. And then I need to reconsider...
Any of my readers which have an advice what to do please comment ASAP. We have only until Sunday to deploy the wisdom of crowdsourcing.
No comments:
Post a Comment