Thirty-five years in international employment. Twenty of them building the entity infrastructure the EOR industry is built on.
I started in international employment and corporate services in 1991. By 1992, I was Managing Director running the overseas operations of a UK manufacturing group, across multiple jurisdictions, with real local entities and real local compliance obligations. Long before “Employer of Record” was a category, this was the work: setting up legal entities, running local payroll, staying compliant with employment law that changes at every border.
I spent twenty years at TMF Group, rising from accountant to a seat on the Group Board of Directors. TMF was, and is, one of the largest entity administration and corporate services firms in the world. That gave me a view of international compliance at scale, across dozens of jurisdictions, for some of the largest companies in the world.
How the EOR industry actually works
When I left TMF in 2011, Employer of Record was a new idea: let a company hire someone in a country where it has no legal entity, by using a provider’s existing local entity to employ that person on the client’s behalf. The client gets compliant local employment without the cost and delay of incorporating.
The problem in the early days was straightforward: the new EOR providers didn’t have entity networks. They had sales teams and client relationships, but not the local legal infrastructure to actually deliver what they were selling. That’s where companies like mine came in.
I founded GOT International to be exactly that infrastructure. We held the local entities. We ran the payroll. We managed the compliance, the local HR issues, the tax filings, the parts of “Employer of Record” that actually require a functioning entity in-country. Early providers like Shield GEO (Tim Burgess, Duncan Macintosh) and Velocity Global (Ben Wright) built their businesses in part on subcontractor networks like GOT International. When they grew large enough to bring entities in-house, they did it properly: fair notice, clear timelines, respect for the relationship.
Where it went wrong
The industry that followed was different. Well-funded, aggressively sold, and increasingly disconnected from what was actually legally possible in each jurisdiction. Sales teams promised compliant employment structures that didn’t hold up. When that gap surfaced, often after the client had already onboarded staff, it wasn’t the provider’s sales team that absorbed the cost. It was subcontractors like GOT International, left holding unpaid invoices for work already performed, employees already paid.
I kept GOT International’s employees paid on time, every time, even when we were owed money by clients that weren’t paying us. We did that for years, across multiple countries. But the debts owed to us by three major EOR providers eventually became too large to carry. In 2025, GOT International stopped trading. We took it to court and lost, not because the case was weak, but because we ran out of runway before the other side did.
What that means for Nova Satus EOR
I know, specifically and from direct experience, where EOR arrangements fail: entity structures that look compliant on a sales deck but aren’t in practice, misclassification risk that gets discovered only after an audit or a labor dispute, and providers whose commercial promises outrun their legal capacity to deliver.
Nova Satus EOR exists to close that gap. Every structure we recommend, every jurisdiction we work in, is assessed against what I’ve seen fail, not just what looks good in a proposal. If an arrangement isn’t legally sound, you’ll hear that from me before you commit, not after something goes wrong.
If you’re considering an EOR provider, evaluating whether your current arrangement is actually compliant, or need someone who has run this from the entity side to look at what you’re being sold, that’s the conversation to have.
— Ingmar Booij, Founder