The Eurobarometer “Undeclared work in the EU” survey conducted with 504 people in September 2019 and published in February 2020 found 13% of respondents had paid for a service they knew would be undeclared.

The key motivation was price (41%), followed by the idea they had helped someone who needed money (36%) and the fact the service was faster (29%).

And the most commonly used undeclared services by Luxembourg respondents were cleaning and ironing (30%, compared to 16% in the EU), repairs (24%, compared to 30% in the EU), hair and beauty (22%, compared to 27%) and babysitting (18%, compared to 7%).

The report stressed that it was difficult to put an accurate figure on the extent of undeclared work in Luxembourg because of different interpretations of its definition. In the report, it was defined as “all remunerated activities which are in principle legal but circumvent declarations to tax authorities or social security institutions”.

However, self-reporting and opinions about undeclared work “differ from country to country because the phenomenon is understood in different ways,” the report author wrote, underlining that the survey results should be taken considered a “conservative estimate of the scale of the problem.”

7% did undeclared work

Reported levels of undeclared work in Luxembourg appeared not to differ widely from the EU average. In total, 7% of respondents admitted doing undeclared work, compared to 3% in the EU. Meanwhile a third said they knew someone in Luxembourg doing undeclared work, the same proportion as across the EU. When asked to put a figure on the proportion of people doing undeclared work in Luxembourg, half of respondents placed it at around 10%. A fifth of respondents suggested as much as 30% of the population could be doing undeclared work.

Luxembourg respondents had slightly more faith in public institutions to crack down on undeclared work, than the EU average with 56% trusting work inspection authority the ITM and 57% trusting the social security authority.