Trust and safety
The protections come with the engagement.
You bring the freelancer you already found. Corelance funds the money before the work starts, verifies who both sides are, holds the paperwork, and keeps a record a disagreement can be settled against. Here is what each of those actually means.
The protections
Seven specifics, and what each one does.
What Corelance holds on every engagement.
Money is funded before the work starts
A contract amount goes into escrow when the engagement is agreed. A skills-test bounty goes into escrow when you invite someone to take the test. Neither is a promise to pay later. The money is committed before the freelancer opens the brief.
When an invoice settles, we pay the freelancer out to Wise, Payoneer, or PayPal. You never hold anyone's bank details.
A skills test is real work, and it is paid
A test is a brief you write, with the bounty escrowed up front so that nobody works for free. Bounties run from $5 to $100 and default to $20.
Every submission is scored against the same weighted rubric of ten criteria, and the scorecard is required before a hire or a pass can be recorded. No decision lands on the record without the reasoning attached to it.
A disputed result goes to arbitration
If a freelancer disagrees with a test result, they respond, you answer, and Corelance arbitrates. The decision is made against the submission, the scorecard, and the written reasoning, all of which were captured when they were written rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Identity is verified on both sides
Every freelancer verifies their identity with a government ID and signs our contractor agreement before they can be paid for anything. Companies verify their legal entity and sign a master services agreement.
Government IDs and tax forms are held in a dedicated vault, kept apart from the application database, and opened only when a review requires it.
We hold the tax form, so it never reaches you
Corelance collects and holds the W-9 or W-8BEN from every freelancer. You never handle it, never store it, and never chase anyone for it.
You contract with Corelance, not with the worker
Corelance is the merchant of record. Your agreement is with us, ours is with the freelancer, and the terms that protect you are built into that shape rather than negotiated one person at a time.
That structure carries an explicit misclassification safe harbor and a reclassification indemnity that survives indefinitely, with country-specific carve-outs for the countries freelancers actually work from. Intellectual property in the work assigns to you on payment, with a moral rights waiver, confidentiality, and data protection terms alongside it.
It also means you are not the party filing contractor tax information returns.
The work is under contract, and the caps hold
You sign a statement of work. The freelancer signs a work order. Both are e-signed in product, both can be amended when scope moves with both signatures on the change, and the engagement closes with the reason recorded.
The limits live in the contract too. Cap the hours per week or the deliverables per period and the cap is enforced when an invoice is submitted, rather than argued about after it arrives. You can require proof of work attached to each invoice, and you can put an approver in front of payment.
The record
Where a disagreement goes.
Disputes settle against the log, not against memory.
Every meaningful event on an engagement is appended to a record you can read back: who signed what and when, what was submitted, how it was scored, what was invoiced, what was approved, what changed and who agreed to the change.
That record is what makes the rest of this page enforceable. Both sides signed something. Both sides verified who they are. Either side can raise a dispute. When one is raised, it is settled against what the record says.
Neither party has to be taken at their word. The account was written at the time, by the system, and both of you read the same copy of it.
Your data
Stated plainly, with no badges.
We state the posture, not a certification we do not hold.
A logo on a page is easy to put there and hard to check. These are the facts about how your account and your engagement records are handled.
- Encryption in transit
- TLS 1.2+ on every connection
- Encryption at rest
- AES-256 on stored records
- Access model
- Role-based and least-privilege, managed across the account lifecycle
- Sensitive credentials
- Held in a dedicated secrets vault, never in plaintext
- Identity documents and tax forms
- Kept apart from the application database, opened only on review
- Data ownership
- Yours. Export it any time. We never sell it.
Standards
What everyone on an engagement is held to.
The rules that come with the account.
- i
Honest representation
Identity, credentials, and work samples have to be genuine. Misrepresentation closes the account, and that holds for companies as firmly as it holds for freelancers.
- ii
Commitments in writing
Scope, rate, and term live in the signed contract. When they move, the contract is amended and both sides sign again. Going quiet on active work is itself a violation.
- iii
The work stays on the record
Escrow, the IP assignment on payment, and the misclassification safe harbor all exist because the engagement runs through Corelance. Taking the work or the payment outside it removes all three.
- iv
Civility is a condition of access
Harassment, threats, discrimination, and hate speech end access. We do not moderate disagreement. We do moderate conduct that makes someone unsafe to work with.
- v
Fraud ends the account
Identity misrepresentation and payment manipulation are grounds for immediate termination, with anything held in escrow returned to the other party.
- vi
The law applies
Activity on Corelance has to comply with applicable law in the relevant jurisdiction. We cooperate with law-enforcement requests where we are legally required to.
Reporting
If something is wrong, tell us.
Say what you saw.
A disputed skills test has its own process and it starts inside the engagement. For anything else, an account that is not who it says it is, a payment that looks wrong, a safety concern, contact us directly. Reports are confidential and your identity stays protected.
We would rather hear something twice than miss it once.
Get started
You bring the freelancer. We take it from there.
Put your next engagement on this footing.
Open a company account, invite the freelancer you have in mind, and everything on this page is in place from the first document they sign.