WKR scan with AI: automatically checking your work-related costs scheme

At the end of the fiscal year you must clean up your administration to ensure you do not exceed the tax-free budget of the Dutch work-related costs scheme. An AI-driven WKR scan checks and categorizes thousands of expense claims at lightning speed based on current legislation. This helps you prevent administrative errors and an unnecessary final levy of 80 percent.

In short

In 2026 the tax-free space is 2 percent of the first 400,000 euros of your payroll and 1.18 percent over the remaining amount.
For every euro above this limit you pay an 80 percent final levy as an employer.
An AI agent helps you test thousands of bookings against tax legislation in a fraction of the time.
Automatic checks on correct allocation prevent levies and signal risks such as false self-employment.

How does the work-related costs scheme work in 2026?

The Dutch work-related costs scheme, known as the WKR, allows employers to reimburse or provide items to employees tax-free. Think of a Christmas hamper, a chair massage or a team outing. You can provide these extras tax-free as long as the total amount remains below a statutory limit.

This limit is known as the tax-free budget. In 2026 this budget is 2 percent of the total fiscal wage sum up to 400,000 euros. If your payroll is higher, you get another 1.18 percent in tax-free budget over the remaining amount. If you spend more in total than your calculated budget, you will pay a final levy of no less than 80 percent on the extra amount.

In practice organizations often reserve this space at the beginning of the year for fixed expenses. Throughout the year loose declarations from employees are added to this. Without strict supervision the tax-free budget suddenly fills up in the fourth quarter, resulting in a hefty tax assessment.

Why do manual checks often fail?

It is crucial to categorize expenses correctly for tax purposes. In many administrations employees book doubtful cases in the tax-free budget by default. That is a waste of budget because many of these reimbursements do not belong there at all.

A dinner with a client, for example, falls under intermediary costs and does not count towards the work-related costs scheme. The untaxed mileage allowance, which was increased to 0.25 euros per kilometer in May 2026, is also a so-called targeted exemption. The same applies to the untaxed home office allowance of 2.45 euros per day. These amounts therefore do not come at the expense of your budget.

Anyone who wants to correct these nuances manually must dig through thousands of lines in the ERP system or accounting software. Descriptions like "dinner" or "travel costs" on receipts are often too vague. It requires extensive context and file knowledge to assess them properly, making the process slow and enormously expensive.

What role does false self-employment play in WKR audits?

The work-related costs scheme is legally anchored in the rules surrounding wages from current employment. This means that you may only grant these untaxed allowances to staff in salaried employment.

Yet invoices regularly slip through where expenses or gifts for hired freelancers end up in the administration. This brings a major tax risk. Provisions to freelancers via this scheme can be seen by the inspector as a strong indication of false self-employment.

When the tax authorities judge that a working relationship is actually disguised employment, payroll taxes and fines follow. A thorough scan of your bookings filters these errors out in a timely manner. You link each booking directly to the right working relationship, preventing subsequent assessments.

How does an AI scan optimize your administration?

Artificial intelligence radically accelerates this checking process. Where classic automation scripts get stuck on deviating receipts, an AI model understands the actual context of a description.

When you consider setting up processes, it helps to choose the right technology. For complex tax judgments it is useful to know whether an AI agent or Power Automate is the best choice for your case. A trained agent reads the invoice, recognizes the context and immediately reflects the expense against tax law.

The AI checks, for example, whether a purchased laptop was necessary for work. If so, the amount is automatically marked as a targeted exemption and not deducted from your tax-free budget. Below you can see how the different tax categories relate to the scheme.

Category	Consequence for tax-free budget	Tax treatment	Example
Targeted exemption	Does not use up budget	Fully untaxed	Travel costs up to 0.25 euros per km
Nil valuation	Does not use up budget	Valued at 0 euros	Work clothing in the workplace
Intermediary costs	Outside the scheme	No wage, untaxed advance	Promotional gifts for clients
Tax-free budget	Counts towards budget	Untaxed up to limit	Christmas hamper, company party
Excessive	Exceeds the budget	Employer pays 80% levy	Luxury gift, extra bonus

What is a good example of an AI assessment?

Imagine an employee submits a mixed expense claim of 350 euros. The receipt shows a hotel overnight stay, a dinner with an important client and a bottle of wine as a promotional gift. Manually it takes an administrator time to split this up and look up the tax rules.

An AI scan does this immediately. The system recognizes the hotel overnight stay as a targeted exemption for business accommodation costs. The dinner and the bottle of wine are recognized as intermediary costs, because they are intended for the client and not for the employee themselves. The AI proposes to book the entire declaration outside the tax-free budget and then asks an employee for approval. This saves time and prevents your budget from being unfairly burdened.

Which steps do you follow during a WKR audit?

To use your tax-free budget successfully and without fines, a structured approach is necessary. An AI tool can support you in these steps:

Inventory the general ledger accounts: Collect all personnel costs, allowances and provisions from your accounting system.
Filter the targeted exemptions: Remove all costs for travel, study costs and occupational health and safety provisions from the overview. These do not burden the tax-free budget.
Identify intermediary costs: Extract the amounts that employees advance for items intended for the organization.
Assign nil valuations: Mark provisions in the workplace, such as coffee or work clothing, which are valued at zero euros.
Calculate the remaining budget: The remaining items fall into the tax-free budget. Check whether the total amount remains below the statutory limit of 2026.

How it works at Prudai

When solving tax issues, Prudai operates within strict frameworks. The tax workflows in LEO Fiscaal follow the fixed pattern: intake, plan, human approval, specialists, counter-role (inspector), reviewer. LEO has 8 professional roles: lawyer, corporate lawyer, civil-law notary, tax specialist, mediator, bailiff, director, patent attorney. LEO covers 6 main legal areas.

LEO, VERA, ZIA, BEVER and IRMA operate on one shared source registry with 158 validated sources. 76 of the sources are live integrations: requested in real-time from the source, not a copy. The AI analyzes and proposes, but writing tools in LEO first request approval via an approval card.

LEO delivers a 30% time saving. All customer data is stored on our own servers in EU data centers (Hetzner), no hyperscaler. Prudai is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and NEN 7510-1:2024. The certificates (NL 3143.1.1 and NL 3144.1.1) were issued on 30 September 2026 by Brand Compliance, accredited by the Dutch Accreditation Council (RvA C 548), and are valid until 29 September 2029.

For the specialist

The legal anchoring of this tax legislation can be found in Article 31a of the Wage Tax Act 1964. This determines the strict requirements you must meet to designate final levy wages.

Within these limits the tax authorities test the so-called customariness criterion. An allowance may not deviate more than 30 percent from what is customary in the market from a tax perspective. The inspector uses a practical efficiency margin of 2,400 euros per employee per year. Provisions above that amount require a considerably heavier burden of proof from you as an employer.

For entities with a financial interest of 95 percent or more, Article 31a paragraph 4 offers the possibility of the group scheme. You may then merge the tax-free budget of all these group companies for tax purposes. Consolidating this does require flawless administration. Legislation is also constantly changing. For example, as of January 1, 2027, the separate tax exemption for staff discounts will disappear, meaning you will have to fit this into the general tax-free budget from then on. These types of legislative changes emphasize the importance of automated and up-to-date checking in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly does the tax-free budget mean in 2026?

In 2026 the tax-free budget is 2 percent over the first 400,000 euros of the fiscal wage sum of your employees. For the rest of the payroll you receive another 1.18 percent in tax-free budget. If you give more allowances than this amount, you pay a final levy.

Does an untaxed mileage allowance count towards this limit?

No. An allowance for business travel kilometers is a targeted exemption and does not count towards the calculation. Note that you may only pay out tax-free up to the statutory limit. In May 2026 this limit was increased to 0.25 euros per kilometer.

Can I use the budget for costs of freelancers?

No, the scheme is only intended for employees with a permanent or temporary employment relationship. If you structurally provide fixed allowances or gifts via the tax-free budget to self-employed persons, you risk the tax authorities seeing this as a strong indication of false self-employment.

How do I prevent having to pay an 80 percent final levy?

By carefully scanning all booking rules before closing the fiscal year. Many invoices are incorrectly booked to the tax-free budget when they are actually intermediary costs or targeted exemptions. With an AI-driven scan you automatically filter these errors out of your system.

Sources

Would you like to know how an AI agent checks your WKR administration efficiently and securely? Discover the possibilities at LEO Fiscaal.

Updated on 19 October 2026