Malta Declaration of Commencement of Employment — Self-Employed Persons (Jobsplus Engagement Form)

Candidate selection

GOV-4169 ("GovSchema Standard Research"). Malta was scouted fresh this cycle as a brand-new-jurisdiction candidate, after four consecutive cycles deepening Latvia's Taxes vertical (lv/vid/annual-income-tax-declaration-form-d, Annexes D1, D2, D2¹, D1¹) reached a natural pause: this cycle's own re-examination of the remaining LV VID annexes found Annex D4 and the DK declaration's own sub-annex ("Deklarācijas DK pielikums") both viable but banked for a future cycle rather than authored now, Annex GD excluded as formula-derived (like the already-excluded D3/D3¹), and no further candidate sharing the D1/D2-class real-HTML-table-rendering precedent known to remain open. A parallel scouting pass also re-checked Ireland's RBN1 sole-trader form (still Cloudflare-gated on cro.ie itself, but reachable via an unauthenticated Dún Laoghaire Local Enterprise Office mirror) and Cyprus's EE1 business-name-registration form (glyph-index-encoded Greek text, needing more extraction effort) — both banked as open backlog in CATALOG.md's Known Gaps rather than authored this cycle, since Malta's Jobsplus form opens a brand-new jurisdiction outright and required no further extraction-technique groundwork.

Reaching the live source

Target: https://jobsplus.gov.mt/media/rqnokvpx/selfemployedenglish2024.pdf?fileId=68044.

• A plain curl request (including with a realistic desktop Chrome User-Agent) is blocked by a Cloudflare JS challenge: HTTP 403, a 5,820-byte Just a moment... interstitial page, confirmed by inspecting the returned bytes directly (<title>Just a moment...</title>, a challenges.cloudflare.com CSP reference).
• Re-fetching the identical URL through this session's own web-fetch tooling returned the genuine asset: HTTP 200, Content-Type: application/pdf, 317,073 bytes.
• sha256 of the retrieved bytes: a4cf3d5b98b92cc792d9c419c522ef5fe5edb5ed91d512596a3fdd23f73304fa.
• This byte count is independently corroborated: a separate research pass into the same URL earlier in this cycle (a different fetch path) reported the identical 317,073-byte figure.
• Confirmed mechanically, not asserted from memory: the retrieved bytes begin %PDF-1.6 and contain zero occurrences of /AcroForm or /Widget (only 2 unrelated /Annot occurrences) — a flat, print-and-fill specimen, not an interactive AcroForm PDF.

Extraction method

Read directly, page by page (4 pages total), via this session's own PDF text-and-layout reader. Page 1 and 2 are the form's own "Notes for Self-Employed Persons" (12 numbered items); pages 3-4 are the "ENGAGEMENT FORM - SELF-EMPLOYED" itself, in three lettered sections (A: Personal Details, B: Details of Employment, C: Commercial Details of Self-Employed). Every field/label modelled below was read directly off the reconstructed page text and the accompanying rendered-page image (which shows the actual box/checkbox layout), not summarized by an intermediate model — a general-purpose web-fetch summarizer tool was tried first against the same URL and explicitly reported it could not decode the PDF's compressed content streams itself; that tool's output was discarded in favour of the direct page-by-page read.

Excluded from fields[]: the "For office use only" checkbox row printed at the very top of the form (Day / Shift Work / Night / Weekends / Teleworker) — it duplicates Section B's own Working Patterns/Teleworker fields as a staff-facing summary box, not a distinct applicant input; and the entire Notes section (guidance prose, the Data Protection Act/GDPR notice), none of which is applicant-supplied data.

Models 39 fields[] across 3 steps mirroring the form's own three lettered sections, plus 3 documents[] entries for the form's conditionally referenced attachments.

Disclosed source-fidelity findings

1. Nationality block blank lines. Section A's Nationality checkboxes (Maltese, Dual Citizen, EU, Non-EU) print a blank line beside the EU and Non-EU options with no stated purpose other than proximity — read as a free-text field for the specific country of nationality (applicantNationalityCountry, requiredWhen the category is EU or NON_EU), since nothing else on the form explains the blank line.
2. Un-captioned checkboxes beneath the Nationality block. Two explanatory notes immediately below the Nationality checkboxes each end in a lone checkbox with no printed caption of its own (the first note's checkbox sits beneath a blank line for writing the EU-national sponsor's nationality; the second has no adjoining blank line). Modelled as applicantIsNonEuDependentOnEuNational (gating dependentEuNationalCountry and the residenceCardOrInterimReceiptCopy attachment) and applicantIsNonEuMarriedToMaltese (gating the freedomOfMovementByMarriageDocument attachment) respectively, on the reading that each checkbox means "this situation applies to me" rather than "the referenced document is attached" — the form does not disambiguate between those two readings anywhere, and this is disclosed rather than silently resolved.
3. "First employment" qualifier not captured. Note 4 states a non-Maltese national must attach an identity/residence-card copy specifically "if this is your first employment" (as distinct from a restart, per Note 1) — no field on the printed form captures whether this is the applicant's first employment, so identityOrResidenceCardCopy is requiredWhen applicantNationalityCategory notEquals MALTESE without that additional qualifier; the narrower scope is disclosed here rather than fabricating an unprinted field.
4. Employment Licence sub-categories not modelled. Notes 4(c) and 4(d) state that asylum seekers, holders of Subsidiary Protection/Temporary Humanitarian Protection/Refugee Status, and third-country nationals additionally require an Employment Licence from Jobsplus' Employment Licensing Unit — the printed form has no field distinguishing these sub-categories of non-EU national (only the broad EU/Non-EU checkboxes at Finding 1), so this requirement is disclosed as informational only and is not modelled as a gated documents[] entry.
5. Printed-asterisk vs. same-address-shortcut tension. Section C's "Address of Commercial Entity/Self-Employed\*", "Locality\*", and "Postcode\*" are each printed with a mandatory asterisk, yet the section opens with an explicit tick-box: "If commercial address details are the same as those in Section A (residence address), please tick this box." Modelled per the shortcut — all three fields required: false with requiredWhen sameAddressAsResidence equals false — with the tension against their own printed asterisks disclosed rather than silently dropped. sameAddressAsResidence itself carries no printed asterisk but is modelled required: true as the necessary discriminator, the same non-printed-mandatory-discriminator convention lv/ur/sole-trader-registration-kr2 established for its own unasterisked branch-selector booleans.
6. Multi-select checkbox lists. "Working Patterns\*" (Day/Night/Shift Work/Weekends) and "Type of Employer\*" (Self-Employed without/with employees, Cooperative, Partnership, Joint Venture, Foreign Owned, Maltese Owned) are both printed as a plain vertical checkbox list with no stated single-select constraint. Modelled with this registry's established multi-select-as-comma-separated-string treatment (pending GSP-0009; see e.g. us/uscis/travel-document-i131, fr/france-visas/schengen-visa-application), not as a forced single enum choice, since e.g. a Partnership that is also Foreign Owned is plausible and nothing on the form rules it out.

Conformance

3 valid mock scenarios and 8 mutation-control fixtures committed under conformance/mt/jobsplus/self-employed-declaration-of-commencement/1.0.0/:

• valid-maltese-self-employed-without-employees.json — a Maltese national, self-employed without employees, commercial address same as residence, no prior Jobsplus employer number.
• valid-eu-national-with-employees.json — an EU-national self-employed person with employees, commercial address different from residence, an existing Jobsplus employer number and PE number.
• valid-non-eu-dependent-on-eu-national.json — a non-EU national dependent on an EU-national sponsor, attaching the residence-card/interim- receipt copy.
• 8 mutation controls: a missing statically-required field (mutation-missing-applicantname-required.json); a missing applicantNationalityCountry while the category is EU (mutation-missing-applicantnationalitycountry-requiredwhen.json); a missing dependentEuNationalCountry while applicantIsNonEuDependentOnEuNational is true (mutation-missing-dependenteunationalcountry-requiredwhen.json); a missing identityOrResidenceCardCopy while nationality is non-Maltese (mutation-missing-identityorresidencecardcopy-requiredwhen.json); a missing commercialAddress while sameAddressAsResidence is false (mutation-missing-commercialaddress-requiredwhen.json); an invalid applicantGender enum value (mutation-invalid-applicantgender-enum.json); an invalid placeOfEmployment enum value (mutation-invalid-placeofemployment-enum.json); and an unknown top-level field (mutation-unknown-field-rejected.json).

An ephemeral, from-scratch conformance checker (deriving required/ requiredWhen rules directly from this schema's own fields[]/documents[], discarded after use, not committed) ran all 11: all 3 valid scenarios at 0 errors, all 8 mutation controls each raising exactly 1 error, and confirmed every requiredWhen field reference resolves (0 dangling references).

Validated clean with node tools/validate.mjs and node tools/validate-ajv.mjs (574/574 both), individually and as part of the full registry run.