The Atlas HXMContractor Compliance Index (ACCI)

The weights are, in the listed order: 10%, 10%, 55%, 25%. The last two pillars are specific to ACCI, and they need to be read together, because they frequently do not move together. Compliance Ease is about clarity — how short and legible the test is, and how much discretion an authority has in applying it. Classification Safety is about consequences — how heavy the penalties, back-pay liability and enforcement appetite are when it happens. A country can draw a very clear line and punish crossing it severely; another can leave the line vague and treat breaches lightly. Knowing where the line sits and knowing what it costs to cross it are separate risks, and the index weights clarity more heavily than consequences.

The scores are absolute, not a relative ranking. Each one is measured against fixed reference points that stay the same from one edition to the next, so a country's score does not move because another country was added or taken out of the set. And a country only appears once there is real data behind every pillar.

The index is built on a blended data model. We use established public sources — including the World Bank, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the European Commission, the IMF, and multiple national governments' offices — to establish the baseline for every country, while Atlas HXM layers in proprietary data from its own contractor engagement work, including real classification outcomes, onboarding patterns, and misclassification risk flags drawn from cases Atlas HXM has actually run.

Read the results as bands, not as a ranking. The scores are precise enough to separate a strong country from a weak one, but they are not precise enough to say that 12th place beats 17th. In practice, differences of less than a point should be considered a tie. A high score also means one specific thing and nothing more — a high contractor score says the legal risk is low, not that contractors are the right model for your business.