"The State of Israel has abandoned 35,<> independent reservists to their fate, they are discriminated against and promiscuous compared to salaried employees who are protected by the Histadrut and have a salary and a social safety net. It can't go on like this anymore," said attorney Roy Cohen, president of Lahav (the Association of Self-Employed and Businesses in Israel), who was a guest on Israel Hayom's economic podcast "Added Value."
Cohen referred to the case of reserve soldier Lior Moshayev, who tearfully spoke this week about his family business that collapsed and that the refrigerator in his home was empty. "Reservists who are also self-employed left everything and went out to defend the country, to sacrifice their lives and left the business behind, and this business continues to have expenses – municipal taxes, rent, loans, suppliers – everything remains.
"The state actually treats these self-employed reservists exactly as it treats salaried employees, gives them salaries on the first of the month based on their reporting, but does not pay attention to their expenses, and I warned that this thing would explode in our faces. It is a crime what is happening with the self-employed who serve in the reserves. You can't send them to the front and expect expenses to continue piling up on the home front. They should have been recognized from the first moment as a frontier settlement, because then automatically all expenses are recognized and paid according to an advance payment."
Cohen said that former Tax Authority head Eran Yaakov, with whom he recently had a conversation, admitted to him that the issue of self-employed reservists is "years of neglect." According to him, a representative of the Tax Authority told the committee that they received the list of reservists only this week. "How do you want the Tax Authority to prioritize if only now, 80 days since the beginning of the fighting, did they receive the list?"
Beyond that, Cohen points to another problem faced by reservists who are business owners. "A reserve soldier who is self-employed and his business is built on receiving an audience, for example, a masseuse, acupuncturist, exterminator, etc., while he is in the reserves, his clients go elsewhere.
Asked whether the grants and rewards program presented last night provides an appropriate response to the self-employed, Cohen said, "Everything is next to and in the headlines, and irrelevant to business owners. It's just patch upon patch."
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