"You have a household employee if you hired someone to do household work and that worker is your employee. The worker is your employee if you can control not only what work is done, but how it is done. If the worker is your employee, it does not matter whether the work is full time or part time or that you hired the worker through an agency or from a list provided by an agency or association. It also does not matter whether you pay the worker on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis, or by the job."

"Household work is work done in or around your home. Some examples of workers who do household work are: ... Yard workers ... "

"If only the worker can control how the work is done, the worker is not your employee but is self-employed. A self-employed worker usually provides his or her own tools and offers services to the general public in an independent business."

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If you hire Jack from Jack's Gardening Service, and he comes with a trailer full of equipment and deicdes to use a riding mower the the bulk of your lawn and a weed eater around the edges, and sometimes sends his employee Jill instead, then he isn't your employee.

If you hire your neighbors son John when he's home from college for the summer, offer him to use your push mower and never mind the places too small for it to get to, and when John is out of town and offers for his dead-beat friend Jacob to mow your lawn that week and you decline, then John is your employee.

In my examples, there is certainly a grey area between John and Jack, but my point stands: the guy who mows your lawn can easily be your employee. Its best to err on the side of employee, because the law is very unforgiving if the IRS decides someone is your employee but you have been treating them as a non-employee.

That's the only sentence in there that actually defines what an employee is, and I fail to see how someone mowing your lawn fits the requirement of dictating "how work is to be done".

A guy who mows your yard every other week -- most likely along with a host of other yards in the area -- is most certainly not an employee. Sure, he could try to make a case if he were injured, but no normal-thinking human is going to interpret "provides occasional service" as "employee".

and when John is out of town and offers for his dead-beat friend Jacob to mow your lawn that week and you decline, then John is your employee.

Preferring the services of one person or company over another has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the definition of employee.

But here in Washington - if the lawn mower isn't a licensed business and isn't paying L&I insurance and he hurts himself on the job and starts to collect disability, the state will get their pound of flesh out of you as his employer.