Outsourcing and staffing arrangements in Peru

Outsourcing is a normal part of running a business in Peru, from security and cleaning to maintenance, logistics and entire operational processes. The legal risk lies not in outsourcing itself but in how the arrangement works in practice. If the client company directs the contractor’s staff as if they were its own, Peruvian law may treat them as its own.

The business problem

Peru regulates two different arrangements. Outsourcing, governed by Law 29245, is the engagement of a company to perform specialized services or works at its own risk, with its own financial, technical or material resources, responsibility for results and exclusive direction of its staff. Labor intermediation, governed by Law 27626, is the supply of workers by a registered agency, and is only permitted for temporary, complementary or highly specialized needs; temporary placements are capped at 20% of the client’s workforce.

When outsourcing does not meet its requirements or amounts to the mere supply of personnel, the workers can be deemed direct, indefinite employees of the client. Even when it is valid, a client that receives continuous placement of staff is jointly liable for their labor and social security entitlements during the placement and for one year after it ends. A 2022 regulation that prohibited outsourcing the core business was declared void by the Supreme Court in a popular action proceeding, so core activities can again be outsourced if autonomy is genuine; we recommend verifying the current status before restructuring. Our guide to outsourcing and staffing in Peru explains the framework.

How we approach it

We first qualify the arrangement: is the provider delivering a service or supplying people? We then test autonomy against the legal indicators, such as the provider’s own equipment, capital investment, plurality of clients and payment by service or result. Where the answer is uncertain, we propose adjustments to the model before it is launched.

We then draft the contract terms that allocate liability: compliance representations, audit and information rights, guarantees and indemnities. Finally, we give the client’s managers practical guidance on what not to do, such as giving direct orders, controlling attendance or disciplining contractor staff. Our notes on outsourcing recharacterization risk and the outsourcing vendor checklist go into both sides.

What the engagement includes, and its limits

The service covers structuring opinions, contract drafting, vendor due diligence, monitoring routines, manager guidelines and risk assessments of existing arrangements. Where contractor staff perform high-risk work on site, it is coordinated with our SCTR insurance advice.

We do not audit providers’ payroll on a continuous basis unless that is agreed as a separate engagement, and we cannot guarantee that an authority will accept a given structure. Contract clauses allocate liability between the parties; they do not prevent an employee from claiming against the client.

Coordination with the parent company, finance and payroll

Procurement usually owns the contract, operations the day-to-day relationship, and HR the risk. We bring them together with a single bilingual memo for the regional office and a monitoring routine that procurement can operate, such as periodic proof that the provider has paid wages, benefits and contributions. Finance receives an estimate of contingent liability where arrangements carry recharacterization risk.

Getting started

Send us the current or draft service contract and a description of how the provider’s staff work day to day. That is often enough to see where the risk is.