[HN Gopher] Some WFH employees now live in another country
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Some WFH employees now live in another country
Author : ghuntley
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-09-15 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| paxys wrote:
| Thoughts as a tech manager:
|
| - People's attempts to hide their remote lifestyle are mostly
| laughable. You don't need sophisticated tooling to know that
| someone isn't where they say. I see you every day. I can
| recognize patterns. I can see the changes in work hours, response
| times and just general behavior. I can tell when you have just
| rolled out of bed with a coffee or come back from the club.
|
| - Most managers I know don't give a shit. In fact we'd rather not
| know at all. It's really HR you have to worry about (and I'm not
| going to tell them unless you give me a reason to).
|
| - HR itself only cares because of the tax implications. Inter-
| state taxes are bad enough, figuring out international ones are
| basically impossible. The company can get into major trouble if
| they are not following local employment laws, and "I didn't know
| my employee lived there" isn't a good enough defense.
|
| - For those saying "IRS will come after you", these remote
| employees are paying full federal, state (mostly CA), payroll and
| various local taxes while using none of the benefits. The
| government is probably ecstatic that such people exist.
|
| - The government on the other side is the one you _really_ have
| to worry about. Locals in Mexico City, all over South America,
| Bali, Thailand, Vietnam and really all over the world are pissed
| with these "digital nomads" (read: illegal immigrants) who work
| on tourist visas and upend the local economy while paying no
| taxes. It's only a matter of time before they all start cracking
| down.
| whatatita wrote:
| > People's attempts to hide their remote lifestyle are mostly
| laughable
|
| That can depend on how/where they're staying. If they're at
| "home" abroad, with a similar time zone, then there's often no
| way to tell except technically.
|
| I have a team mate who often spends time across the border for
| weeks at a time. We wouldn't know if she didn't mention it.
|
| We are in the EU though, so working from other EU countries is
| fine, within limits.
| bombcar wrote:
| Timezone is the most noticeable one, but that can be solved
| by going north or south.
|
| If you go too far of course, then your workmates might notice
| that it's winter when it should be summer.
|
| And anyone with the login details can see where your login
| pings are from.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Timezone is noticeable, but really depends on how different
| and how many "Webcam On" meetings you have. My home office
| has blackout curtains, so it's always the same light
| condition regardless of time of the day.
|
| Now, it's hard to attend some meetings when time difference
| is very dramatic, like it's 1am in your local, but 10am at
| work HQ.
|
| > If you go too far of course, then your workmates might
| notice that it's winter when it should be summer.
|
| Doubt. Most of my co-workers use virtual backgrounds. I
| wear the same home clothes the entire year.
|
| > And anyone with the login details can see where your
| login pings are from.
|
| Good luck, I have a WireGuard box at my parent's house that
| I route my work traffic through when needed. Maybe I should
| start a business of hosting "residential" VPN exit nodes...
| serjester wrote:
| A $20 vpn router you connect to would solve this.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > If you go too far of course, then your workmates might
| notice that it's winter when it should be summer.
|
| I am curious as to how. Working from home, no one has ever
| seen the inside of my home. Much less outside of my window.
|
| The temperature of my office is stable through the year.
|
| I can think of fashion colour schemes, makeup and tan. But
| that would require a lot of observation and not everyone
| changes those each seasons.
| bombcar wrote:
| The assumption is that some absolute modicum of small
| talk occurs, and the moment you slip up and mention
| shoveling snow in summer the jig is up.
|
| If all work is entirely work talk it would be easier.
| knorker wrote:
| > The government on the other side is the one you really have
| to worry about. Locals in Mexico City, all over South America,
| Bali, Thailand, Vietnam and really all over the world are
| pissed with these "digital nomads" (read: illegal immigrants)
| who upend the local economy and pay no taxes. It's only a
| matter of time before they all start cracking down.
|
| Also your employer needs to worry about this. And therefore you
| need to worry about your employer suing you.
|
| If you think that's far fetched, do you think your employer
| will NOT throw you under the bus when France sues your German
| employer for turning a blind eye to where their employee is?
|
| Frankly as a tech manager YOU are adding legal risk to yourself
| personally by protecting the employee from the company.
| Arguably YOU personally are complicit in tax fraud.
| aiisahik wrote:
| This is trash. I hire engineers all over LATAM. I could not
| care less if they pay their taxes. I do not pay any taxes in
| LATAM. My company does no business in LATAM. What are they
| going to do? Sue my company? LOL.
|
| P.S. I used to be a lawyer and I can weigh the risks.
| Completely negligible compared to all the other risks I have
| as a founder.
| knorker wrote:
| It's very much not trash.
|
| As you say this is risk. You can make any tradeoff you
| want, and you are probably right.
|
| You can hire someone you think may be working from Iran.
| You're pretty sure you won't get caught violating sanctions
| for it.
|
| > I could not care less if they pay their taxes
|
| I don't know LATAM employer side taxes, but if their tax
| offices do decide to target you then what you "could not
| care less" about will not matter much.
|
| But shrug, yeah you probably won't get caught.
|
| My favorite lawyer quote: "Legal didn't say we can't do it.
| Legal says if we do it then we may all go to jail. It's not
| the same thing".
|
| And indeed it's not. But it's not trash.
| abigail95 wrote:
| It is trash
|
| France won't sue the German employer, If anything illegal
| occured, "France" will sue the person _exporting_ the
| labor, not the person buying it.
|
| The jurisdiction of France encompasses French people, and
| French entities.
|
| If a law was broken _in Germany_ about importing labor,
| then it 's the German goverment enforcing the law.
|
| Which only means you have to follow the laws of your own
| country only. Which includes your own countries
| sanctions, but doesn't include _all countries sanctions_.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| And as the employer, I'm the importer of the labor so I
| don't care. If my contractor didn't pay their taxes that
| is not really my problem - they will just have to do deal
| with that themselves. What's very important is that I, as
| labor importer, didn't have to pay payroll taxes of the
| country where the labor was based. In the case of
| Argentina it's close too 100% of the salary. When i pay
| my contractor triple the average engineering salary they
| would get from a local country they are more than happy
| with this situation.
| shallichange wrote:
| LATAM: government wants income tax, and foreign exchange
| cuts too. Argentina wants employees to run their
| paychecks through the central bank so that they can take
| a 50% cut. And they also have sales tax. So government
| are targeting those off the banking system and export
| regulations
| aiisahik wrote:
| How do the tax offices of other countries "target me"
| exactly? What legal options do they have against a US
| based company with no business/customer in that country?
|
| They can go after my contractors but then my contractors
| would just move to another country like Uruguay (which
| btw is very tax friendly towards remote workers and
| hardly charges any taxes). Some of my contractors have
| done exactly that.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yeah, but you probably hire contractors? It's not the same
| as employee.
| francisofascii wrote:
| > Arguably YOU personally are complicit in tax fraud
|
| "I don't understand. All I did was get up in the morning."
| line from The West Wing from a similar circumstance when the
| council threatened jail time for not reporting someone.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| As a tech employee turned contractor:
|
| I write software for pay. That's it. I don't see my employer as
| a boss - they are a customer. If they aren't happy with the
| product, they can find someone else and I can respond to the
| other 50 LinkedIn requests...
| knorker wrote:
| As a contractor you are free to incorporate wherever you
| want.
|
| I wouldn't work from e.g. Iran, or you could get sued to
| death when your customer is indicted for violating US
| sanctions, but yeah why would your employer care?
|
| Oh, because maybe they have various insurance and partner
| contracts that speak about your physical location.
|
| If your contract doesn't say where you are, then work from
| anywhere, and follow whatever laws.
|
| If your contract does say where you are, then violate the
| contract an your own risk.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| In my state, counties also assess income tax. The largest city
| has lower tax levels for people who work _in_ the city but live
| elsewhere.
|
| Our payroll app needs to know what days you are working from
| home. This way, if you work in one county and live in another,
| the county you live in will get their share of the income tax.
|
| I think this is going to be a huge problem in a year or 2 when
| cities & counties see a large drop in income and try to figure
| out how to "fix" it.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Locals [...] are pissed with these "digital nomads" (read:
| illegal immigrants) who upend the local economy and pay no
| taxes
|
| Wait, aren't digital nomads literally bringing money in from
| another country? They pay taxes on everything they consume, yet
| they don't take the money from _inside_ the country, they bring
| it in from the _outside_.
|
| Why exactly would they be pissed?
| cromka wrote:
| > Wait, aren't digital nomads literally bringing money in
| from another country?
|
| I used to make the same argument, but it's just so convenient
| when it's easy to forget that there is a _reason_ why income
| tax exists on top of VAT in the first place. And that 's
| because VAT doesn't cover all of the budget expenses.
|
| So you pay your hefty income tax back home, and only pay VAT
| on the products and services provided by (private) entities.
| The proportion of the budget not covered by VAT is covered by
| the locals and their income tax. That's not OK.
|
| Same reason why the most touristy places impose additional
| tourist tax.
| rr888 wrote:
| I think the point is you are breaking the law. Most sensible
| people wouldn't care. Its if you get an over zealous customs
| official, tax hound or local police. If you keep you nose
| clean you're probably OK but if you get in a fight or piss of
| the mayor you might get extra tax fines or jail time.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Wait, aren't digital nomads literally bringing money in
| from another country? They pay taxes on everything they
| consume, yet they don't take the money from inside the
| country, they bring it in from the outside.
|
| Not quite. They do bring money by buying things and paying
| sales/VAT tax. However, they don't pay income taxes because
| in 99/100 times they are not allowed to work, so they are
| illegal immigrants essentially.
|
| They also come with their LA salaries and make renting/buying
| harder for locals.
|
| I know people who do that in Thailand on tourist visa, and
| just have a short vacation every 90 days to qualify for new
| tourist visa.
| bombcar wrote:
| The same reason many cities that are now overcrowded are
| pissed at all the rich people that moved in and bought
| everything up.
|
| If one or two digital nomads move in, the locals won't care
| much and the nomads will just become one of the types of
| people they have.
|
| But if a town becomes infested with them, it can cause all
| sorts of issues (the nomads won't care about food prices
| because they can afford US prices, which are 10-100x what the
| locals have been paying, so prices can suddenly skyrocket).
|
| Hell, you have it inside the country:
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/03/go-back-to-
| california...
|
| And it's not always where you think it would be.
|
| Tourism has done similar things to cities around the world;
| turning what used to be actual functioning cities into
| amusement parks for adults. Venice might be a good example,
| some say.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reminds me of one of my buddies who decided to move out of
| California after going permanent remote. He encountered
| more than one realtor who informed him that the seller
| intends to charge a "Californian Tax" percentage on top of
| the asking price to any buyer from California because they
| just don't want us in their communities. Talk about cutting
| off your nose to spite your face.
| deckard1 wrote:
| in the US? Sounds like it's time to update the Fair
| Housing Act to include state/city/hood/zip/street origin
| next to national origin. Ridiculous.
| bombcar wrote:
| It can also be "Californians will pay over sticker so
| soak 'em" vs "locals won't".
|
| Also being from far away can lead to not knowing the area
| as well as you should and being disappointed.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Because nomads owe them more than they already pay
| slim wrote:
| you are right with regards to developing countries. if you
| bring foreign currency you are welcome
| LanceH wrote:
| Right up until there are enough of you that the price of a
| house goes up, and the restaurants go upscale.
| knorker wrote:
| Citizens working without paying into pension, healthcare, or
| following local employment laws (best example: France, that
| really cares what employees in their borders do).
|
| You can't simply unilaterally declare that sales tax
| compensates for everything you do, and think laws don't
| apply.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| They also do not qualify to receive from most of those
| services. So are they really a burden?
| sedawk wrote:
| They would still be using a lot of city/state/country
| local infrastructures (utilities, roads, parks, emergency
| medical/police/fire services, local libraries, to name a
| few), won't they? Costs for these might not be funded by
| Sales Taxes alone or at all. Not paying one's dues to the
| City/State/Country of residence in accordance with local
| laws is not only illegal, but also immoral; it breaks
| revenue calculations city/state/country makes based on
| multitude of things (at least in most sane places), and
| if a nomad is not doing not paying equal share, then the
| locals are footing the bill for them! Mere income tax on
| landlord's rental income is not something that will come
| close at covering all the income gaps city/state would
| face if one were authorized local worker. As someone else
| pointed out, these nomads are earning in foreign currency
| that literally translate to 10x-100x in local currencies,
| they will simply drive the prices up and soon drive them
| up enough out of reach of the locals simply because
| nomads can afford inflated prices.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > drive the prices up
|
| and who is receiving these 10-100x'd prices? The locals
| who are providing value to the purchaser. Higher selling
| prices are profits in some locals' pocket/bank account.
| Why does this side of the equation never get talked
| about?
|
| Yes I may make the price of a taco go up 20c, but that's
| 20c more profit for every taco sold at that price. The
| workers, the business, the real estate value, the whole
| supply chain can all now command a better price because
| of my "wasteful" spending relative to the context.
| sedawk wrote:
| That is assuming the (much debunked) trickle down
| economics. A 20c increase in taco price is not going mean
| an increase in the worker's pay (if any at all). Minimum
| wages haven't increased (much) in the States for over a
| decade, in spite of record profits for a lot of these
| minimum wage employers. Sure, the price increase is going
| to help with wealth accumulation for some, but certainly
| not all, and the ones left out will feel the sting.
| Someone on a pension will see a sudden increase in
| prices, property taxes etc. something she didn't have
| enough buffer to accommodate. Of course, there are other
| forces that will do the same too, but it would be
| foolhardy to ignore the effects of digital nomads on
| local economy. Better to get ahead of it in terms of
| public policy before it becomes too big of an issue. Same
| way governments around the world are struggling to curb
| inflation, nomads can cause (unexpected) inflation on
| local economies.
| vkou wrote:
| The same can be said about illegal immigrants and
| temporary visa holders in the United States. An H1B
| worker pays taxes, pays into social security, etc, but
| isn't going to get a penny back out of it.
|
| And yet, for some reason, a lot of people really
| dislike[1] H1Bs...
|
| [1] Last election cycle, I've received a beautiful
| election pamphlet from a frothing-at-the-mouth state
| politician-want-to-be who spent most of his 250 words
| assuring me that H1Bs are robbing the country by mooching
| all of its services while not paying any taxes. He, uh,
| got 40% of the vote.
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| There's a glaring difference between a digital nomad
| working remotely and someone on an H1B or an illegal
| immigrant - the digital nomad isn't participating in the
| local labour market. Increasing the labour supply (which
| most assume would decrease the price) is the major
| complaint people who dislike H1Bs/illegal immigrants. A
| digital nomad isn't competing with the people he lives
| near for scarce jobs, so that complaint doesn't apply.
| vkou wrote:
| > the digital nomad isn't participating in the local
| labour market.
|
| Yes he is. If the firm's willing to employ someone in
| Costa Rica, there's no reason it couldn't be employing a
| local.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| This is the typical communist/labour style answer which
| ignores that todays mobile work force is not just a body
| in a geography. An employee past about 5 years experience
| is essentially unique when observed across the many
| variables (education, years of experience with each
| specific tool, industry/domain experience, soft skills
| etc). Just because a capable expat employee happens to
| presently be located in Costa Rica, doesnt mean a capable
| Costa Rican can be found. The most valuable people in the
| workforce are not cogs.
| ajvs wrote:
| Gentrification which increases the price of housing and other
| goods is a common complaint in Mexico.
|
| Though in my opinion this financial arbitrage is simply
| inevitable due to the housing market in Western countries
| being overinflated by investors.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It goes back to the 'government is not a monolithic entity'.
| Local tax authorities have no problem with it and likely
| encourage it ( more money flowing around for just about
| everything ), but there are always beancounters at the top,
| who think they may be able to extract even more.
| paxys wrote:
| Not all jurisdictions have sales taxes. And sales taxes
| aren't anywhere close to covering 100% of the budget for a
| city/state/country.
|
| That foreign money mostly goes to a handful of
| landlords/Airbnbs and tourist-friendly businesses (which are
| often foreign owned themselves). That in turn drives up
| prices of everything for locals - who are seeing no increase
| in income and moreover have to pay income tax and a ton of
| other taxes on it, something that digital nomads conveniently
| skip.
|
| An influx of foreigners and foreign money isn't automatically
| welcome in a local economy.
| kelnos wrote:
| Maybe it's time for governments to stop relying on income
| taxes so much, and instead really on land/property taxes
| for the bulk of their revenue. Sales taxes are regressive,
| but there are ways to keep them from hurting lower income
| folks as much.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| and even then, a digital nomad's expenditure inside their
| country _is income_ to the next hop. They're simply
| losing on a single hop in an infinite chain of taxation.
| themanmaran wrote:
| How is property tax a good substitute for income tax?
| Property is not a 1:1 to value creation.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Why punish value creation when you can punish rent-
| seeking? It is a strictly better substitute.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Using taxes as punishment makes for a very unreliable
| revenue stream. Rent seekers move on, and you're left
| with everyone else holding the bag.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| That's the beauty of it. Land can't move.
| zdragnar wrote:
| It won't move, but the utilization will change to be
| minimize the cost.
|
| I suspect that will be a net negative for anyone who
| needs to rent because they cannot afford a mortgage,
| maintenance cost, insurance, contribution to shared
| infrastructure like plumbing and electrical, and taxes
| together.
|
| I considered renting an apartment in two different
| commune-owned buildings (I was a student, not looking to
| own). Both were just as expensive and in significantly
| worse condition than all of the neighboring housing
| options. I found w nice place, but would have been better
| off with a slumlord rent-seeker than either of those
| places.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| > It won't move, but the utilization will change to be
| minimize the cost.
|
| Yes people will build more medium density housing instead
| of having zucchini gardens in one of the most expensive
| regions of the world. Higher density would be good for
| renters in the local area.
|
| This, taken to it's "extreme":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
|
| Pretty well studied, and has a lot of support across
| ideological viewpoints.
| [deleted]
| Test0129 wrote:
| Property taxes are extremely regressive. Probably the
| first or second most regressive tax you can conceive.
|
| I, a lowly middle class worker buy a house in Cheapville.
| I can afford it, and the property tax, so I am happy. 20
| years later I own my house and hundreds of thousands of
| immigrants from TechVille come buy up all the property.
| Great! There's no houses really on the market so the
| value sky rockets! Problem... my house value goes up, but
| so does my property tax. In fact, it's so expensive now I
| can no longer afford to live in the house. I have to sell
| MY PROPERTY because the STATE has imposed a tax
| specifically designed to destroy the idea of property as
| an owned right. In some circles this would be considered
| theft-by-taxation which is probably the only correct
| interpretation of this scenario. My house has to be sold
| because I can't afford it, it's bought (read: stolen) by
| some rich tech bozo with more money than sense, and I
| have to move. Probably to a different state where then I
| contribute to the very same problem there. The problem is
| the regressive property tax enabled this. The only
| solution is to not have them for residential non-
| commercial property. If property is not producing
| tangible value it should not be taxed. Taxes are
| collected at the sale of the home - this is enough. If it
| isn't, congress needs to tighten the purse strings.
|
| Property taxes are regressive, prevent you from ever
| truly owning your own plot, and disproportionately reduce
| the wealth of the people who spend most of their lives
| creating it for other people. They are probably the most
| distilled form of evil the financiers of a state or
| country can create because they are totally unavoidable
| and because of the way percentages and property value are
| calculated can very quickly go way out of hand. The only
| people that benefit are the rich house flippers and
| people with so much money their property taxes are a
| rounding error. It puts property in only the hands of the
| wealthiest. How is this a good thing?
| smallerfish wrote:
| I cannot get behind a property tax - if you own and have
| paid off a house, the idea that the state could seize it
| is abhorrent. Tax transport, wealth, sales - almost
| anything else in preference to property. Housing is a
| primary need.
| prottog wrote:
| Maybe it's time for governments to stop relying on taxes
| so much, period. Maybe they can reduce their scope a
| little bit.
|
| I do wish that land value tax would replace other forms
| of taxation in many jurisdictions.
| liuliu wrote:
| Not many countries rely on income taxes. For example,
| Thailand has about 11% tax revenue from personal income
| tax: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-
| statistics-asia-... Mexico is 20%:
| https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-
| latin... Vietnam is 8%: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-
| policy/revenue-statistics-asia-...
|
| It is very hard to collect personal income tax in
| developing countries. OP's tax revenue claim just doesn't
| match the data. On the other hand, corporate tax and VAT
| are very easy to collect. Digital nomads are very good
| for these revenue streams.
|
| It is true these digital nomads don't contribute to
| social security benefits. But they also rarely take from
| it. So it is a mixed bag.
| White_Wolf wrote:
| soo... you want those that ammount to tourists to pay taxes
| in the country they visit? By your logic I should pay taxes
| to the country I go on holiday on the paycheck I get while
| being there.
|
| You are forgetting the tax income from the money all those
| "tourists" spend in that country. Who do you think benefits
| from those taxes?
|
| I do agree with you that it can befome a problem if those
| "tourists" start buying properties in those places. That
| should not be alowed without permanent residence (of, at
| least, a few years).
|
| "That in turn drives up prices of everything for locals
| "===> Are you serious? Do you realise how many of these
| "tourists" (% wise) are needed to affect the market in a
| city? Even 1% is nothing more than a blip(IMHO).
| np- wrote:
| This isn't about being a legitimate tourist though. That
| has always been allowed. There are not many jurisdictions
| around the world where you are allowed to work and not
| pay any taxes though. Just because there is a loophole
| where you _can_ work remotely and it's extremely hard to
| detect or enforce doesn't suddenly make it legal, you are
| simply violating the terms of your Visitor's visa.
| jonp888 wrote:
| > By your logic I should pay taxes to the country I go on
| holiday on the paycheck I get while being there.
|
| No, because when your are on holiday it is not your place
| of employment.
|
| All they want is if you are using somewhere as your place
| of employment, that you pay taxes that are due on earning
| that money in the country, the same as if your are
| employed locally. It's not unreasonable.
|
| > Who do you think benefits from those taxes?
|
| You can't pick and choose which taxes you want to pay and
| then say there is some 'benefit' for deigning to pay any
| at all.
|
| Next time you stay in a hotel, try saying "I've shouldn't
| have to pay my bill, you should be grateful enough for
| the 'benefit' of the money I spent in the bar because I
| was staying here", and see how that works out.
| [deleted]
| hibikir wrote:
| For most purposes, a foreign tech worker is a lot like
| having an extra tourist on any given week. They are giving
| money to your local businesses, but aren't competing with
| locals on anything but housing. The locals are going to see
| an increase in income in the very same way that they do in
| tourist towns: Extra demand for goods and services will
| provide more jobs and quite possibly marginally higher
| wages.
|
| Take a random tourist town: Say, in the southern coast of
| Spain. Then tell them that finally, they had managed to get
| rid of all the tourists, forever. Is that good or bad for
| the town? It's not as if there are no externalities, but in
| general, tourism is going to be good for your economy, and
| the amount of extra taxes the tourist pays on lodging is
| pretty low. Which Caribbean islands do better, those that
| have a lot of tourists, or those that don't take any
| external money?
|
| Also consider what happens in the opposite side of the
| remote worker, where what you get is the equivalent of a
| foreign worker who comes in, pays taxes, but spends
| basically nothing, and spends all their salary in
| remittances, to be spent abroad by their family. The worker
| is competing with you for the job, but then doesn't spend
| it locally! You will not find many municipalities that are
| all that happy of having a lot of jobs formerly done by
| locals in offices suddenly done by someone that is far
| away.
| paxys wrote:
| You are assuming that all tourism is a net positive for
| any region, which itself is a faulty premise. In a lot of
| cases unchecked tourism, immigration and foreign money
| only increases the income divide among locals and
| contributes to inflation and gentrification.
|
| Not all these foreigners are living in tourist towns.
| They aren't staying for a week or two, but months at a
| time. They aren't staying in hotels meant for tourists,
| but rather competing with locals for apartments (a lot of
| them having turned into Airbnbs because of it).
| gherkinnn wrote:
| > They are giving money to your local businesses, but
| aren't competing with locals on anything but housing.
|
| Competing over housing i quite significant if you ask me.
| Test0129 wrote:
| This is the primary reason housing is in crisis in the
| US. Tech workers and foreigners finding cheap but
| gentrifiable places and driving up the price of housing
| to the point no one can afford it but them.
|
| While OP is right in that these people are a net good for
| the economy at large there's a reason a LOT of countries
| do not allow foreigners to own property. The US is one of
| the few places where you can without much trouble. You
| can see the problem this causes with states adjacent to
| California, like Nevada, where the average house is now
| over 10x the average income thanks to the tech
| emigration.
| deepsun wrote:
| Even that is a good thing for local developers and
| homeowners.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Still blatlantly ignoring the majority of people who are
| not wealthy enough to profit from tourism, but only get
| the downsides of it, which I'm not going to list here as
| they are many and proven.
|
| Edit: No, more potential careers as an underpaid waiter
| or touristic guide is not an upside.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > is a lot like having an extra tourist on any given week
|
| And as OP explained in the comment you're replying to,
| tourism is not necessarily a positive for the locals:
|
| > That foreign money mostly goes to a handful of
| landlords/Airbnbs and tourist-friendly businesses (which
| are often foreign owned themselves). That in turn drives
| up prices of everything for locals - who are seeing no
| increase in income and moreover have to pay income tax
| and a ton of other taxes on it, something that digital
| nomads conveniently skip.
|
| It doesn't really matter if you're a digital nomad or a
| classic tourist, the same downsides apply, but in the
| case of digital nomads they're even working while being
| on a tourist visa. They should pay taxes to the local
| administration but they don't, so that makes them a
| double problem.
| viscanti wrote:
| Would income taxes from digital nomads make housing prices
| go down? There would be more money going to those
| governments but it's unclear that those governments could
| help offset most of the increase in costs.
| azinman2 wrote:
| No because they increase demand for housing while supply
| is fixed, and then have much more money than locals to
| get whatever housing they want. This is what happened in
| SF for example as techies invaded and displaced the non-
| tech middle and lower classes.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| That they have wealth outsized compared to the local economy
| could have distortionary effects.
|
| One of the biggest examples would be in real estate, where
| foreigners could be comparatively very wealthy compared to
| locals, and can thus out compete locals and dramatically
| raise the price of real estate.
|
| This is why some jurisdictions that found that the amount of
| properties being purchased by foreigners was becoming
| startling have brought in foreign buyer taxes to try to even
| out the distortions in the economy and make it more fair for
| those who earn their incomes in the local economy.
| kelnos wrote:
| I was reading about this in Vancouver and Toronto. From
| what I read, the foreign buyer taxes did indeed massively
| decrease foreign real estate investment, but it's not at
| all clear that it actually lowered home prices, or even
| slowed down home price growth. Not what I expected or hoped
| to see (as I live in SF and would advocate for something
| similar here if it worked).
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| I'd say that's true. The reasons being that the housing
| economy is an enormously complex system and so while
| addressing certain problems fixed those problems, there
| still remained others which still continued to induce
| high prices.
|
| (using Vancouver as an example, after the foreign buyer
| tax the city still has an incredibly low near 0% rental
| vacancy, which makes secondary home investment enormously
| profitable and continues to keep prices lofty)
|
| This doesn't mean that it wasn't a good idea to address
| the foreign buyer problem, but it was clear that the
| system instantly shifted to compensate for the lack of
| foreign buyers, and new buyers appeared. There was plenty
| of local buyers, many of which had existing properties
| with inflated land values they could borrow against and
| the ultra low interest rates from the pandemic that aided
| them in bidding up properties to buy. Good for local
| buyers to have less foreign competition, no real change
| for local renters.
|
| The most real direct outcome of the foreign buyer tax was
| the nature of the housing product that was made changed.
| Previously there were companies that were building
| "luxury" condos explicitly marketed as pied a terres to a
| foreign audience (largely from major cities in asia).
| Overnight this sort of thing went away and the same
| companies that were previously pushing these products
| instantly pivoted into building purpose built rental
| buildings for locals.
|
| Ultimately I think the foreign buyer tax is good for
| local renters, but further work needs to be done.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Locals in ... all over South America... are pissed with these
| "digital nomads" (read: illegal immigrants)
|
| Brazilian here. At least on the part of South America that I
| know that well (a little more than my country), nobody gives a
| shit.
| tifik wrote:
| > upend the local economy and pay no taxes I understand that
| taxes are important to maintain local infrastructure, but up to
| a certain point, isn't it beneficial having a few people
| literally bringing in foreign money to pay for the same
| products and services other locals pay for? There are places
| that officially encourage that behavior.
|
| I understand how that might eventually upend the local economy
| - it's called gentrification and while digital nomads certainly
| contribute to it, it surely can't be fully blamed on them.
| Places where people want to live at will eventually get
| gentrified in some shape or form.
|
| The logic behind labeling digital nomads as illegal immigrants
| completely eludes me. I genuinely don't understand why you
| would make that assumption.
| paxys wrote:
| > The logic behind labeling digital nomads as illegal
| immigrants completely eludes me. I genuinely don't understand
| why you would make that assumption.
|
| Close to 100% of them are on tourist visas and are explicitly
| not allowed to work in the country. What else do you think an
| illegal immigrant is?
| tifik wrote:
| > Close to 100%
|
| Can you share the source for this data? I find it
| exceptionally difficult to believe.
|
| I do not condone people doing anything illegal. But you can
| maintain the lifestyle of a 'digital nomad' while not
| breaking any laws whatsoever. I definitely do not believe
| that 'close to a 100%' of people would risk their jobs, the
| wrath of the tax man and potential prison time by not
| abiding by the relevant legislature, especially given that
| there are usually many available options.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well, say you're working for US company, and you're US
| citizen. You move somewhere else and still working for
| that US company. Now, try to get a work visa or work
| permit in this case. What are you going to do? Got to
| country X consulate and say "I want to work for the US
| company while I stay in your country, can I haz visa?"
|
| But it entirely depends on local laws. Canada allows you
| to work for non-Canadian company that has no business in
| Canada. Things, a bit more complicated when you sell
| goods and services in Canada, though.
|
| Spain has new digital-nomad visas that allow working in
| company that aren't in EEA. Before that, like many others
| EEA countries, they didn't allow working on tourist visa.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > "I want to work for the US company while I stay in your
| country, can I haz visa?"
|
| Yes. As we've been learning for 20+ years from the music
| industry. If you restrict easy access to what people want
| or make unrealistic demands, then people just side step
| you. But if you make it easy and accessible people
| happily pay.
|
| Obviously the details vary, but frequently the terms are
| as egregious as
|
| 1. Regardless of length of stay we now want a % of your
| annual earnings
|
| 2. The process involved takes orders of magnitude longer
| than your stay
|
| 3. The typical legal fees involved is orders of magnitude
| greater than what you'll even earn in the time period,
| meaning your best alterative to "No" is actually to take
| time off, paid or unpaid
|
| 4. You're literally bringing them an opportunity so it
| feels unjust to be barred. An opportunity to have tourist
| income -- something that many countries _pay_ to compete
| for.
|
| There will be a massive upside for the first country to
| have a safe desirable location, with fantastic internet,
| and visa policies that make sense in the above rubric.
| panzagl wrote:
| Usually it means work in the country you're visiting- I
| can't go to Mexico for a week and wait tables, but if I
| vacation there I still get paid by my employer.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Vacation sure. But if you want to _work_ from these
| countries then you can 't be on a tourist visa.
| tifik wrote:
| It comes down to how you define 'working from a country'.
| Doesn't it mean 'being employed by a local company and
| paying income taxes' there?
|
| If I go on a vacation and respond to a few work-related
| emails, am I breaking any laws because I'm working on a
| tourist visa? Yes, that is ad absurdum, but I'm trying to
| point out that it's not as clear cut. There is a line
| that international treaties define, and staying someplace
| (sometimes even up to 6 months) and working there doesn't
| necessarily have any income tax implications for you or
| your employer.
| triceratops wrote:
| > If I go on a vacation and respond to a few work-related
| emails
|
| Law isn't code. Reasonable people (judges, normally) are
| able to decide what is "actually working" and
| "incidentally working while on vacation".
| [deleted]
| triceratops wrote:
| The two examples you gave are not equivalent.
|
| It's not about whether you're working for a Mexican
| employer or not when you're in Mexico. It's about whether
| you're working at all.
| tifik wrote:
| > It's about whether you're working at all.
|
| Yes, but 'work' also has a legal definition. My research
| mostly involves Canada, so I will cite from the IIRC [1]:
|
| "What kind of activities are not considered to be "work"?
| An activity which does not really 'take away' from
| opportunities for Canadians or permanent residents to
| gain employment or experience in the workplace is not
| "work" for the purposes of the definition.
|
| ...
|
| - long distance (by telephone or Internet) work done by a
| temporary resident whose employer is outside Canada and
| who is remunerated from outside Canada;
|
| ...
|
| We recognize that there may be overlap in activities that
| we do not consider to be work and those activities which
| are defined as work not requiring a work permit in R186.
| However, the net effect (no work permit required) is the
| same."
|
| So yes, you can work remotely from Canada, while on a
| tourist visa, for a foreign (non-Canadian) employer.
|
| A lot of OECD countries have treaties (look up 'double-
| taxation treaty between A and B'), that govern this.
|
| 1 - https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-
| citizenship/co...
| triceratops wrote:
| > This section contains policy, procedures and guidance
| used by IRCC staff. It is posted on the department's
| website as a courtesy to stakeholders.
|
| My point, which I also made in another comment in this
| thread, is that law isn't code.
|
| If you spend 3-6 months every year on a tourist visa in
| Canada working for your US employer, Canada's going to
| cotton on eventually and take action. If you do it a few
| weeks a year, you'll likely be fine.
|
| Their test is "are you directly or indirectly competing
| with a Canadian worker?". If your employer is really ok
| with you being abroad 3-6 months/year then they should,
| presumably, also be ok with hiring Canadians or legal
| permanent residents to do the same work 12 months/year
| from Canada.
| tifik wrote:
| Letting your employee be out of the country for 3-6
| months every year on a tourist visa is a lot different
| from actually getting incorporated in that country and
| paying income taxes there.
|
| >for your US employer
|
| US/Canada have a very interconnected labor market, so in
| this context your comment is perfectly valid, and I would
| guess there are additional rules for this specific case.
| For literally any country other than US though, I don't
| see why it would be an issue for Canada or the country of
| origin, even if you do it repeatedly year over year.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Mexico is starting to get a lot stricter on FMMs and IMF agents
| are getting reticent to issue them for maximum term like they
| used to. I'm told this is a result of IMF getting really
| frustrated by the number of people who are repeatedly taking
| out 180 day FMMs with only token returns to the US to avoid
| getting permanent residence - which is not very difficult but
| means the tax collector knows you're there!
| pain2022 wrote:
| What these abbreviations mean? IMF is not even googleable.
| This is so annoying
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm not sure either, but I'm guessing IMF is their
| immigration authority, and FMM is a type of (tourist?)
| visa.
| bitL wrote:
| I am sorry, but what is the problem? So somebody already pays
| crazy taxes in their home country, then pays rent in another
| country (including taxes), sales taxes and likely spends much
| more than locals in the foreign economy. The foreign taxman
| gets a wind of possible more money, starts taxing those folks
| on top of what they already pay and they just move out,
| spread the word, weakening the economy further. If they
| overstay 180 days or whatever is needed for a tax domicile
| then yeah, they should pay taxes there, but with the current
| tax regimes that might not be technically possible. What
| prevents folks to stay 179 days in Mexico and 179 days in
| Costa Rica?
| cambalache wrote:
| lgleason wrote:
| Costa Rica is staring to do this as well.
| outworlder wrote:
| About your last point. Interestingly, some governments have
| been trying to entice people to work remotely in their
| countries. Iceland is the latest example. I'm guessing that,
| while they don't directly collect the tax revenue, there's some
| incentive to the local economy as that's where a lot of the
| consumption would happen.
| huevosabio wrote:
| >Locals in Mexico City, all over South America, Bali, Thailand,
| Vietnam and really all over the world are pissed with these
| "digital nomads" (read: illegal immigrants)
|
| While it may be the case in other countries, Mexico has fairly
| straightforward laws that allow you to work remotely for up to
| 4 years without paying local income taxes. Basically, as long
| as you have a stable job outside the country, you are fine.
|
| The mood among some Mexicans may be negative, but for the most
| part Mexicans understand (thanks to a long experience with
| tourism) that foreigners bring in the big bucks. And this is
| good for us.
| rupi wrote:
| This is 100% correct.
|
| The biggest risk is the remote country coming after the
| employee and/or employer. If you are the employer, and you are
| 100% sure you are never going to do business in the country,
| you MAY be ok. However, there are tax treaties at play as well
| and that can complicate things.
|
| If the remote country goes after the employee, it may get ugly
| especially if the employee is still there. That indirectly also
| impacts the employer.
|
| So if you or your employees are going to work from a different
| country, read their regulations and be very careful about
| staying longer than the time period that they consider you a
| resident for tax purposes.
|
| This is quite an interesting space for some future startup.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I'm quite suprised you are willing to hire people who you know
| are lying to you.
|
| To me, someone like that has demonstrated that they can't be
| trusted and I would remove them from the business ASAP.
|
| You can fix a lot of things with an employee/employer
| relationship, but those things require trust. You just don't
| ever know where you stand with someone who lies.
| jackblemming wrote:
| Would you rather hire obvious liars or good liars? Everyone
| lies occasionally, or omits information. To believe otherwise
| is naive.
| Nathanba wrote:
| That's kind of an important thing to lie about (money and
| work related), I'd rather have someone not lying about
| anything at the very least on that subject. Actually, I'm
| editing the comment. Even lying about anything is bad
| because you'll eventually start lying about something work
| related too. That's just how it is, whether it's a time
| table, some interaction you had with a customer where you
| don't quite paint the truth or anything else. Eventually it
| always impacts the real world. That's the thing about the
| word "lying", it's not so precise. You practically mixed
| "omitting information" and "lying" together even though
| they can be extremely different in quality, depending on
| intent, situation and much more.
| ev1 wrote:
| > - The government on the other side is the one you really have
| to worry about. Locals in Mexico City, all over South America,
| Bali, Thailand, Vietnam and really all over the world are
| pissed with these "digital nomads" (read: illegal immigrants)
| who work on tourist visas and upend the local economy while
| paying no taxes. It's only a matter of time before they all
| start cracking down.
|
| Thailand explicitly gives out digital nomad visas for this?
| aiisahik wrote:
| You don't need to worry about the government on the other side
| either unless your company actually does business in that
| jurisdiction in such a way that they can sanction you. Local
| governments are usually trying to attract digital nomads with
| remote working visas. One gov can crack down - the nomad would
| just move to a friendlier jurisdiction.
| lgleason wrote:
| I'm not sure you are correct about the countries the digital
| nomads are flocking to being pissed about them. Maybe a few
| locals, but, the government of Costa Rica is encouraging
| digital nomads because it brings money into the country because
| these nomads are dining at local restaurants, shopping at local
| stores, hiring people to clean their house, paying rent etc..
| When the average salary in 10k a year in these countries a
| digital nomad is easily spending enough to create at least one,
| if not multiple jobs for a local.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I don't violate foreign laws if I buy a goods online from
| another country.
|
| I don't need to know anything about laws governing
| manufacturing to purchase a screwdriver made in California. I
| only need to know my own laws.
|
| Is it legal to import screwdrives in my jurisdiction? Yes. Can
| I do this transaction without violating my own sanction laws?
| Yes
|
| That's it.
|
| Whether the California entity is allowed to sell to me is
| _their problem_ , not mine.
|
| The same applies for labor. I want to buy foreign labor? I
| negotiate the price, I get the work, I pay the invoice.
|
| Which laws do I consult? Every potential country-to-country mix
| in the world?
|
| No, I consult my own laws.
|
| Is it legal to purchase foreign labor/services. Yes. Can I do
| this transaction without violating my own sanction laws? Yes
|
| Whether I buy a website or a screwdriver - I do not need to
| know anything about who I'm buying it from beyond the necessary
| information to avoid international sanctions.
| Melchori wrote:
| You clearly never heard of import laws or ignore it to make
| an argument which is flawed.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > upend the local economy
|
| Are the governments really that upset with illegal immigrants
| that (typically) don't commit crimes (aside from
| immigration/taxes) and spend (by local standards) crazy amounts
| of money in the local economy?
| steele wrote:
| Don't commit crimes aside from crimes
| kyleee wrote:
| no, not really, unless it is politically expedient for them
| to appear to care. most politicians view themselves much
| closer to the digital nomads in terms of class/social status
| as opposed to their constituents / regular folk, ex.
| politicians already mostly live in gentrified/fancier areas,
| dine at the higher end restaurants, and fancy themselves
| world travellers
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I can't wait for the frictions to loosen and this effect to work
| IN THE OPPOSITE direction. Workers in mostly wealthy country are
| taking advantage of a cost of living arbitrage, but soon
| employers will figure out they can take advantage of cost-of-
| worker arbitrage, meaning there is some local in the foreign
| country your current employee is in who could also probably do
| the job but for a fraction of the amount of money.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > meaning there is some local in the foreign country your
| current employee is in who could also probably do the job but
| for a fraction of the amount of money.
|
| This sounds like the same tale we heard in the 90's, that
| software would be offshored to Asia and there would be a
| handful of people writing specs and overseeing work and not
| much more.
|
| As the saying goes 'you get what you pay for'.
|
| If you have talented people anywhere in the world, they have
| either already emmigrated to higher paying markets or are
| contracting locally at absolutely fair prices in an
| international market.
|
| The sort of scenario you describe would have been true with
| information assymetry. However in the connected world of today
| if you think that someone is talented enough to be an effective
| asset but naive enough to not know their rate in an
| international market you are in for a surprise.
| thro388 wrote:
| Skilled people will always be hard to find.
|
| But why not hire some "manager of diversity" or "HR cook" in
| Jamaica?
| [deleted]
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Or just don't pay tax.
| onychomys wrote:
| History suggests that's not a recipe for long-term success.
| lowkeylazers wrote:
| c
| dncornholio wrote:
| If you're able to fool your complete working space, I think
| there's something wrong with you. I couldn't do this without
| losing so much sleep, it wouldn't even be healthy. Just be open
| about it? Also, this article smells of corporate manipulation.
| fbrncci wrote:
| At the first chance I could I moved to South East Asia while
| working a remote job in Europe. Employer was not too stoked. But
| then found a new employer, which was absolutely okay with me
| living there. There is A LOT to the story which I'm not
| mentioning, but it's been the best decision or my life. I'm also
| meeting more and more other people here which are making the same
| move. Many of them who haven't yet told their employer that they
| now live 5+ different timezones away.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > Many of them who haven't yet told their employer that they
| now live 5+ different timezones away.
|
| In other words, there's probably a lot of tax evasion and fraud
| going on.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Are you employed by your employer, or are you contracting with
| tax residency in SE Asia?
| fbrncci wrote:
| I'm now working for a local software agency which contracts
| my clients for me. Through them I've been able to get my work
| visa/permit. Took me some time to arrive at this point.
| clvx wrote:
| For most of these actors this is going to work just fine until
| their org ship a laptop with a gps device.
| ouid wrote:
| I suppose we're going to need hardware GPS spoofers then.
| [deleted]
| endisneigh wrote:
| From the employers perspective the easiest way to get around this
| is hybrid. Though I sympathize, between this and the whole "I'm
| going to work multiple jobs concurrently" - it seems the
| relationship with employers will become even more adversarial
| than it already is.
| rtev wrote:
| It does seem like a small percentage of bad actors will ruin
| remote work for everyone.
| dcole2929 wrote:
| I have no real problems being people wanting to work remotely now
| and forever but I do think this is going to require a new legal
| framework to support it.
|
| For better or worse there are very real tax issues associated
| with employees working in states and countries different than
| what their employer and government believes. A lot of these folks
| are knowingly or unknowingly dodging taxes in a way that is going
| to have severe consequences for them and company.
|
| Establishing a tax base in a new city or state can put a company
| on the hook for thousand if not millions of dollars worth of
| additional taxes. And for the worker if you're company isn't
| withholding the right amount of state federal and local taxes you
| can find yourself with a huge tax bill at the end of the year.
| creaghpatr wrote:
| On the bright side, we'll have 87,000 new IRS agents to catch
| these unwitting tax cheats.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I don't think the IRS agents will catch the guy in the
| article who allegedly lives and works in England, but
| actually lives in Thailand and works in England :)
| MisterTea wrote:
| Its 2022. An AI will automate it.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Yes. Badly, with arbitrary punishments for those it finds
| out of compliance, and no appeals.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I should have included the /s tag as the humor appears to
| be lost on most.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| To be perfectly fair, I don't think "It's $DATE, that
| should be automated by AI by now" is really a joking
| matter on this site, considering the audience. :)
| aiisahik wrote:
| It may but mostly likely won't unless you're a huge company.
|
| I hired a bunch of people outside the US and it's not a
| problem. Use Deel and hire them as contractors. Make the
| contractors fill out W8BENs. Don't let the HR folks and lawyers
| scare you - they don't understand risk vs reward mentality of a
| startup founder.
| codegeek wrote:
| Outside the US is a bit easier. How would you hire an out of
| state employee IN the US who moves to a different state ? You
| will need to register your business in that state then.
| Deal/remote.com don't help with that.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Already had that happen. Employee moved out of NY to FL.
| Did nothing except categorizing him as a FL resident in our
| HR system. Did not have to form a new business in FL or
| register as a foreign entity there. Employee lowered his
| taxes because he is no longer paying NY taxes. Great for
| everyone!
| randerson wrote:
| Unless he meets very specific criteria he may still owe
| taxes.
| codegeek wrote:
| "Did not have to form a new business in FL"
|
| You may want to double check this. May be your HR System
| filed stuff on your company's behalf but you absolutely
| need to have a setup in the state where your employees
| work and that includes Florida.
| srk_hn wrote:
| Real question: Strictly speaking from a software engineering
| perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of taxes created
| by people who don't understand technology get to decide where I
| move around to?
|
| I signed up for your job in a certain location and a certain
| date. That doesn't entitle you to keep track of where I am the
| rest of my life. As long as I'm able to be reached at the
| initially agreed upon location, regardless of how I maintain
| that communications channel, I never agreed to let you dictate
| where I live and move to and frankly nobody has that right.
|
| Or is my body my choice just a convenient catchphrase for one
| topic only?
| guhidalg wrote:
| Serious answer: Wherever you choose to live, you benefit
| directly or indirectly from services paid through taxes.
| Maybe your employer doesn't care where you live, but the
| jurisdiction where YOU are does care about where you work
| because you are being paid but you are not paying what others
| around you are paying to live there. This is a 3-sided
| relationship between you, your employer, and the civil
| society you live in and WFH in a different country is unfair
| to one side of that triangle.
| lowkeylazers wrote:
| serious question: how is this different if you live in the
| city making X amount and then move to the suburbs where X
| is now supposedly 2X.
|
| In my head we all pay the dues somewhere in some form to
| begin with - property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes etc.
|
| It's one thing if you're avoiding paying those.
|
| but how is it different that Twitter gets a tax write off
| to move to the Tenderloin. and if Joe/Jill chooses to move
| to the suburbs or temporarily move to Mexico while still
| paying state and federal income tax. sure there maybe some
| property tax loss but isn't housing crisis already an
| issue? don't company incorporate in Ireland to pay less
| tax?
| bombcar wrote:
| California has already started to try to tax people
| leaving, if I remember correctly. Something about the
| value of investments sold afterwards that appreciated
| during their time in California.
|
| It's only going to get worse as the differentials
| increase.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| guhidalg wrote:
| In the US a majority of your taxes go to federal and
| state governments, whether you live in the city or the
| suburbs doesn't change where your taxes go and how much
| you're paying. The cost of living difference in that case
| is based on micro-economic supply and demand cost
| differences.
|
| Companies moving to Ireland IMO are definitely exploiting
| tax loop holes and committing fraud. You and I and all of
| the countries devoid of tax revenue are hurt by companies
| benefiting from tax-avoidance loop holes.
| srk_hn wrote:
| How is that any different from the relationships between
| AirBnB/Uber and the respective authorities?
| guhidalg wrote:
| If you mean why Uber or AirBnB get to avoid paying taxes
| and you don't, they definitely are committing tax fraud:
| https://www.icij.org/investigations/uber-files/uber-tax-
| have... and https://www.passiveairbnb.com/airbnb-tax-
| evasion/
| dageshi wrote:
| Countries have mechanisms to deal with this. VISA's, they
| can simply charge more for longer stay visa's. Would they
| capture all of potential value of those taxes? No. But
| they'd likely capture a decent amount of extra money which
| they otherwise wouldn't have got, while still restricting
| people from taking native jobs in their countries which is
| what the wider populace actually cares about.
|
| Pretty sure some countries are doing this already.
| Guid_NewGuid wrote:
| Just to provide more info.
|
| There's quite a few now, something like 33 countries with
| these visas. The terms tend to vary. I took advantage of
| the first one, the Barbados digital nomad visa which they
| created to work around the loss of tourism due to COVID.
| Since most taxes in Barbados are sales taxes and they
| have a peg to the US dollar it has worked well for them
| in terms of foreign currency reserves and supporting the
| tourist industry during the pandemic.
|
| Other countries like Costa Rica require visa holders to
| pay local income tax which is fair enough while others
| don't or have a reduced rate.
|
| I'm unsure of the overall morality of it but it can be
| done legally through the correct pathways as I have been
| doing.
|
| I don't like that people will just do it on tourist visas
| instead though which I'd guess is the bulk of the
| objection to it.
| dageshi wrote:
| I think most tourist visa's in most countries which are
| likely to have this issue are at most 3 months. If a
| country chooses to allow back to back tourist visa's like
| that then they sort of know what's going on and have
| accepted it as a net benefit overall. If they don't
| permit back to back then after 3 months you've got to up
| and move somewhere else which many people do, but
| realistically they're not that much different from a
| tourist in practical terms.
| immigrantheart wrote:
| Picture me this. Imagine You are a foreigner that has
| software engineering skills but not good enough (emphasis) to
| compete with the cream of the crop that commands high salary.
| I.e you are the bottom of the barrel. You can't afford a
| property where you live. You can't afford shit where you live
| because your society is expensive.
|
| Then you have this bright idea of "oh let me go to another
| cheaper country and get the benefit of their cheaper society
| but still command high salary".
|
| And you still don't want to pay tax in that country.
|
| Foreigners like these need to be ban 10000%. Losers that
| can't compete in their home country and still don't want to
| pay taxes everywhere they live.
| asciimov wrote:
| You're missing the forest for the trees.
|
| This isn't about an individual's right to free movement. It
| is about keeping employers honest about where their employees
| work and making sure they are paying their fair share of
| local taxes.
|
| Groups of people put a strain on the local resources, we need
| those local taxes to fund those things.
|
| If individuals were allowed to live somewhere and dodge the
| local taxes, every large company would use this to their
| advantage. Suddenly campuses of workers would all now be
| "remote" employees from their offices in some tax friendly
| area. This would put an undo strain on the local tax base who
| are now having to foot the tax bill for those not paying
| their share.
| EveYoung wrote:
| Well, you should care about it because laws apply to you
| whether you agree with them or not. So, at the end of the day
| both you and your employer will have to cover those costs.
| But nobody is preventing you from moving, you just might have
| to quit and look for a new job.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > Real question: Strictly speaking from a software
| engineering perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of
| taxes created by people who don't understand technology get
| to decide where I move around to?
|
| Real answer: The "software engineering perspective" you have
| here is irrelevant to tax/immigration law. Taxation is based
| on where you live and work (physically). And countries very
| much get their say on whether or not they'll allow you to
| live there, for how long, and for what purposes.
| okaram wrote:
| In theory I don't care where the bytes come from.
|
| In reality, there are IP kind of laws, contract enforcement,
| taxes, time zones ...
| nicwolff wrote:
| Ouch, yeah. My team is losing a truly excellent engineer
| because he moved home to the UK during the pandemic, and
| corporate eventually noticed and said he could either 1. switch
| to our UK unit and work on their projects at their pay scale,
| or 2. leave the company.
|
| He's leaving to work for a friend's startup and I hope he gets
| rich.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| codegeek wrote:
| Yep. When I am hiring remote in US (out of state), we put a
| condition in the contract that you will notify us if you are
| planning to move from your home state because we may have to
| establish tax residency/nexus in that state as an employer. If
| an employee moves somewhere else and lies about it, it can put
| both the employee and employer at serious risk of violating
| compliance/HR/tax laws. For example, there is something called
| Workers Compensation that the employer has to buy. If an
| employee gets injured while working, workers comp. may matter
| based on the location of where they were at the time and can
| get denied if there are discrepancies. As an employer, we
| absolutely cannot risk having employees working from anywhere
| when they are supposed to work from specific locations only. No
| one likes these stupid laws but we have to follow it as an
| employer.
|
| It is a little bit easier for international hires if they are
| just doing contract but even then things like W8-BEN etc come
| into play and dealing with IRS is always tricky and risky.
|
| Honestly, if we are going fully remote (anywhere,anytime), we
| almost need a multi-national agreement/treaty so that employers
| are not left trying to deal with BS stuff. And no, services
| like Deel/remote.com are not enough.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| It really seems like what we're really discovering is that
| employment law is completely insane and ridiculously out of
| days.
| deckard1 wrote:
| globalization, cheap easy access to air travel, and the
| internet are breaking down the systems that were working
| fine for countless years.
|
| It's not limited to employment, either. Create a SaaS or
| other internet-based business and try to serve customers
| outside your nation. Or even outside the border of your
| state/territory/province. Entire services such as Paddle
| exist just to deal with this. But I suspect _most_ people
| are trying to fly under the radar here using regular
| Stripe, etc. and not dealing with any of it, just like
| digital nomads do.
| bombcar wrote:
| In the US there are already many states with population
| centers that cross state boundaries; those states often have
| negotiated with each other to solve some or most of these
| issues.
|
| So if you live in Wisconsin but drive to Minneapolis for work
| each day, they know how to handle it.
|
| We need more of those and closer to pairings for all states
| to make true "work from anywhere in the US" possible. I doubt
| it'll happen, because the states won't agree on the baseline
| level.
| fantod wrote:
| Not to mention visa and health insurance issues.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Who created this liability for companies?
|
| This doesn't make sense.
|
| Is there a specific rule anywhere federally that any US state
| that says you must be aware at all times where your employees
| are when spending personal (non-work) travel time?
|
| Moreover: 1) Can a state with no tax nexus to the firm (until
| the employee moved into it) have some kind of enforcement
| mechanism on the company ?
|
| If (1) is no, and it comes down to a judge, 2) is there any
| case law that shows what is reasonable ? Does employer need to
| check every month ? every year? 3) Does a company have any
| responsibility if the employee lies ?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You must be aware of where your employees are _working from_
| because you have an obligation to follow the employment and
| tax laws of that location. If your employee isn 't doing
| work, you aren't required to care (beyond any IP or personal
| security concerns you may have).
| wyager wrote:
| This is one reason among many we should eliminate employer-
| based tax enforcement. Your taxes should be between you and
| the government; the government should not force your
| employer to act as a tax nanny (e.g. with mandatory
| withholding).
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Ahh.. but you see. This way there is a cashflow for
| interim projects and government does not have to wait for
| you to voluntarily give what you think is fair:P
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That still wouldn't absolve companies of the obligation
| to know where employees are working from. Employment laws
| and worker protections vary from one state and city to
| another. To give one example, I had a friend that was
| fired from his Arizona job in ~2015 when his boss found
| out he was gay. If that friend had been working from
| California instead, he would have had legal protections.
| Melatonic wrote:
| The problem is that these laws are all written from the
| logical perspective that employment is mostly a thing
| where work occurs locally. What we need are new
| frameworks specifically for remote work and a way to
| manage this all internationally. Maybe something similar
| to that minimum corporate tax that has been proposed (on
| all companies internationally) but for individuals?
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I understand your point but axing the entire tax portion
| of this problem is massive. Sure, your employer would
| probably still have to know to some degree, but it would
| be much easier and could end up with something like "you
| don't need to tell us unless you're working from
| $listOfPlaces".
| sedawk wrote:
| Good luck getting that (potentially every changing) list
| from the hands of your HR and legal departments!
| Remember, that (at least in US) lot of protections and
| laws change quite frequently and not knowing where an
| employee is would put the company at huge risk.
| Companies, for most part, establish their bases where
| they find local laws are favorable to them (in addition
| to ability to find enough able warm bodies to fill the
| positions), they don't want to open themselves up to
| lawsuits, legal hassle, what-nots from state/city the
| laws of which they are not fully appraised of all the
| time! What happens when that @listOfPlaces change, say
| every year?
| andylynch wrote:
| Not going to happen (would be complicated and makes tax
| revenue collection harder and reduce govt income while
| enabling widespread fraud). Also worth considering this
| is risky from an employer perspective as having employees
| based in unexpected places also means unexpected,
| possibly large liabilities eg local sales tax, employee
| rights etc. Specifically for US firms, foreign employment
| rights differ greatly and are often stronger in ways US
| firms find surprising eg around annual and parental
| leave. For example, a someone working from, say, France
| for a US firm with EU retail customers could quite
| possibly trigger a EU tax enforcement action against the
| company if it's not on top of things. Or they could quite
| reasonably avail themselves of their much better French
| leave and competition rights.
| codegeek wrote:
| "Does a company have any responsibility if the employee lies
| "
|
| May be, may be not but in practice, you are not going to be
| able to tell IRS or another compliance org. that sorry, my
| employee lied so it's not my problem. As the employer, you
| are still on the hook for any taxes and other compliance
| related issues regardless. You can sue your employee may be
| later but that is not going to save you from the wrath of
| Uncle Sam and others.
| ttymck wrote:
| Why would an employer be unable to claim indemnity if their
| employee committed fraud? I agree that your position is the
| safe, conservative perspective, but I don't think it's
| quite so absolute.
| lowkeylazers wrote:
| This is just another ploy to get employees back to offices. One
| thing I don't understand is the tax implication and where you're
| allowed to work from.
|
| I'm based out of a company in the US that was proactively working
| towards remote environment before the pandemic. One thing that
| struck me as odd was that even within the states I would be
| technically illegally evading taxes if I worked from Nevada for
| instance - for a month let's say due to need in change of
| scenery. Even with a country I cannot technically and legally be
| remote.
|
| The laws need to change here are the antiquated tax laws. I don't
| understand how if I want to work from Florida for part of the
| year to avoid the winter is a tax / insurance liability for me or
| the company.
|
| The last point really hit home for me. What if you have family
| abroad - either healthy or otherwise - and you want to spend more
| time with them. would these companies want be to take one month
| off or rather work?
|
| I understand that people using this to move permanently is a an
| issue. But the people that have a permanent base but would like
| to occasionally work from elsewhere need a better framework and
| set of laws. The physical borders don't make much sense in a
| digital world.
| okaram wrote:
| You know? It's called a vacation... We used to have those, even
| in the USA ;)
|
| Notice taxew are not a big deal for small companies... If
| Thailand wants to send my small restaurant a tax bill, I'd just
| drop it in the round file.
|
| If I'm a big company and do business in Thailand, then I have
| to abide by their laws.
| knorker wrote:
| > One thing I don't understand is the tax implication and where
| you're allowed to work from.
|
| You do understand that's basically the entirety of the thing,
| right?
|
| And the tax and legal liability is NOT just on you, but on your
| employer too. It's not that they legally have to know where you
| are as such, nor that they care, but that in order for them to
| follow laws they have to know which laws apply.
|
| > The physical borders don't make much sense in a digital
| world.
|
| Yet that would be hard to argue when you get caught with weed
| in Saudi Arabia, or when the french police knock on your
| digital nomad door in south of France.
|
| At some point this becomes like the "sovereign citizen" crowd,
| and their "your laws don't apply to me" don't tend to work out
| very well.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Can someone ELI5* the major reasons a large employer would want
| to enforce return-to-office? Some other comments touch on tax
| laws for domestic/foreign work, but why by in the office at all?
| (* sorry if wrong forum for this acronym)
| sfvegandude wrote:
| IT is easier when everyone is in the same place - for example,
| fixing a person's work laptop or updating software. Workers
| compensation is easier to manage, for example if someone is
| injured on the job. Finally, as much as the knowledge class
| hates butts-in-seats as a metric for performance, it is easier
| to tell "how" your employees are doing when you see them every
| day. Especially when you want to check if someone is burning
| out.
|
| In my view, both sides of the RTO divide have failed to
| adequately acknowledge the pitfalls of their own position,
| which has led to this topic being unnecessarily polarized.
| asdff wrote:
| If managers are making time to interact enough with their
| employees day to day to actually assess burnout, then they
| can make the time to have zoom meetings with their team. Its
| no different. Funny you cite IT when that line of work
| especially is basically 50% remote work if not more of just
| controlling a users device remotely to fix software issues.
| Hardware issues you could just mail out/in gear to one site.
| Probably a whole lot cheaper than having a dedicated IT
| department in each and every office you have around the
| globe.
| jen20 wrote:
| Without suggesting that these are the only reasons or that they
| apply to every company, here are some:
|
| - companies may have committed to have certain numbers of jobs
| in certain locations to get tax breaks in the past,
|
| - companies may have built out office space and want to get use
| from it,
|
| - incompetent middle managers prefer their subjects to be right
| in front of them so they can use time-in-seat as a proxy for
| productivity,
|
| - some work is collaborative in nature and may be easier in
| person, and managers would rather not pay for travel for the
| times it is necessary.
| kennend3 wrote:
| This is an excellent list.
|
| Adding a few items to it:
|
| - It isn't just middle managers who use "seat time" as a
| proxy.
|
| - Businesses often sign 10+ year leases and commercial real-
| estate is EXPENSIVE. With a long term lease in place how do
| they justify the rents while the space is vacant?
|
| - Many senior leaders are required to be in the office, so
| naturally you need to be there too.
| bbarn wrote:
| Plenty of reasons.
|
| For many companies the transition to remote during covid was a
| massive drop in performance of their staff. For developers, IT
| and the like, most of us had some experience, if not had
| already transitioned, but in those industries that hadn't, it's
| easy to look at those two years and say "this was worse".
|
| Unless your company is VERY focused on remote staffing,
| collaboration is just easier in person for most roles. Add in
| time zone differences and it gets even more difficult.
|
| Some people are bad at working remotely at home. Especially if
| there are distractions in their home office. (Like my wife, my
| dogs, my daughter, etc.) It can be hard to get others to take
| working from home seriously. I've gone as far as to rent an
| office for myself to go to every day.
|
| When remote becomes a possibility, the idea of living elsewhere
| soon follows for many people. (as in this article) Even without
| crossing national borders, many US companies have tax and legal
| implications across state lines. Even supporting benefits for
| employees becomes more difficult as almost all health insurance
| networks are state based.
|
| There are no doubt a thousand and one people that could reply
| "But not me, why should I change" but the simple truth is many
| people are easier to get higher quality work out of in person
| in an office, and an office is easier to manage than a
| distributed workforce.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > For many companies the transition to remote during covid
| was a massive drop in performance of their staff.
|
| This was the expected outcome, since most companies hadn't
| prepared at all for a multi-year global lockdown. However, my
| understanding is that even companies that had very little
| preparation handled the pandemic absolutely fantastic, and
| other factors were much more important (supply chain of
| physical goods, jobs that could only be done in-person,
| reduced travel and leisure etc). If _productivity_ dropped
| for white-collar WFH type of jobs across the board, I think
| we would never hear the end of it. Instead, the media
| zeitgeist is blaming the "anti-work" culture, that people
| aren't taking minimum wage jobs anymore etc. It's definitely
| not the narrative I'd expect if "WFH=low productivity" were
| true.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Many reasons but the two that seem to be the most common are
| that managers don't feel comfortable evaluating employees on
| output rather than time their butt is in a chair and many
| people (ICs and management alike) use the office as an outlet
| for their social needs. Perhaps the third reason, though less
| common, is the belief that the best ideas come from hanging out
| at the water cooler.
| ebiester wrote:
| The one that hasn't been mentioned yet is that the flip side of
| "managers want to see their people" is "managers' jobs are much
| harder in remote positions."
|
| It means that every meeting is via zoom. That's great for 2
| hours a day. It's terrible for 6 hours during a meeting-heavy
| day. (Consider a manager with 15 reports that meets with 2 tech
| leads half hour weekly, a manager for half hour weekly, all ICs
| for a half hour bi-weekly, and has 4 hour long manager
| screening interviews a week. Team rituals usually take about 4
| hours a week; anything else has been moved to email/slack.
| That's about 16 hours a week base load. Every single one of
| those, and every other meeting, is either on zoom (exhausting)
| or writing up an email (which takes 2-3 times as long as having
| a meeting.)
|
| On top of that, performance management is more difficult. For
| great and average performers, it's not that different. However,
| it's much harder for low performers because it's bad to offer
| feedback async. So, things that should be a five minute
| conversation in an office turn into having to schedule a
| meeting. It also means that we have to rely on metrics more as
| well, and everyone here knows how bad metrics are at judging
| performance.
|
| The problem amplifies for senior management. You lose the
| rewarding parts of the job and the parts that were positives
| turn into drudgery or negative.
|
| I work remotely. I choose to work remotely because the
| positives outweigh the negatives, even as a manager, but it is
| a harder and less rewarding job remotely.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| The company pays for that office. Maybe they own it, maybe they
| lease/rent it. If it sits empty, then it is a non-performing
| asset and they need to get rid of it. Or shrink what part of it
| they rent until there isn't any "wasted" space.
|
| Cities depend on property taxes. If all the offices suddenly
| stop being used as offices, they're going to have a terrible
| time. Nobody is paying taxes.
|
| Commercial real estate is over built. If too many companies
| decide that they don't need commercial space anymore, then the
| market is going to collapse. Every one who borrowed money to
| build/own commercial real estate is going to find their bubble
| getting popped. Like the 2007-2008 meltdown in residential
| property.
|
| If commercial real estate gets re-valued to reflect the newer,
| much lower, need for that space, then asset values fall through
| the floor. So anyone who still _is_ paying taxes will be paying
| much lower levels of taxes. More bad news for cities.
|
| Too many managers depend on people sitting in chairs. This is
| usually called "presenteeism". Part of the problem with
| presenteeism is that people feel forced to show up to work even
| if they are sick. Mismanagers usually don't know what you do.
| Or how to measure whether you're doing a good job or not. But
| they _can_ see whether you 're at your desk or not.
|
| Manager empires are based on the number of people. If all of
| your minions are working from home, then other mismanagers
| cannot measure your status any more. Likewise, this leads to
| why many mismanagers pad their staff so that they can appear to
| be more important. Unimportant managers don't get "good"
| parking spaces, nor good corner offices. Nor do they get
| admiration from the other mismanagers.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > 66 percent of the 1,500 full-time employees surveyed in the
| U.S. and U.S. said they did not tell human resources about all
| the dates they worked outside of their state or country, and 94
| percent said they believe they should be able to work wherever
| they want if their work gets done.
|
| This is what it boils down to. If you want a remote workforce,
| you're not going to be able to keep them confined to some box
| that you decide is acceptable.
| bedast wrote:
| I suspect what it really boils down to is laws. Taxation works
| different outside of US borders, and there may be export
| restrictions to consider. It's a valid point that you won't be
| able to nail down a remote workforce that travels within the
| country's borders, but leaving the country may be a problem.
|
| I am not a lawyer so perhaps my hypothesis is wrong.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| good luck to any company that wants 1) a competitive remote
| workforce and 2) to monitor employee movements and locations
| at all times
| smileysteve wrote:
| the companies may care less.
|
| The country/state an individual is working from has the
| potential to arrest and deport the individual. Or fine and
| garnish wages for unpaid taxes.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| For countries they have visas to go on, but moving
| between states or within the eu zone, how would they even
| know? If I have a po box or perhaps even a street address
| in WA or TX (no state income tax) but live in an airbnb
| somewhere in CA, how can the state figure it out? The
| employer probably can't either since you could run their
| vpn over your vpn.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > For countries they have visas to go on
|
| That's precisely the point; Many workers are not applying
| for work visas, which makes them outlaws and subject to
| deportation. Some countries have digital nomad visas with
| 0% tax rates now, but not most.
|
| > If I have a po box or perhaps even a street address in
| WA or TX (no state income tax) but live in an airbnb
| somewhere in CA, how can the state figure it out?
|
| Hypothetically, CA is financially incentivized to find
| that out, how is the the question.
|
| But, if they do then they are going to
|
| 1) audit
|
| 2) if you don't respond to audit and tax -- arrest
|
| 3) at the same time suit the employer, especially if they
| have any operations in CA for not declaring your work
| properly.
| ska wrote:
| What you are basically saying is, as an employee, "is it
| possible to commit fraud in this way". The answer is
| obviously yes. It's a completely separate question
| whether or not tax law should be the way it is.
| [deleted]
| bmhin wrote:
| I mean, taxes are a real thing and you have to pay them
| based on where you (the employee) live and do work. In
| the US for state income tax, it's a confusing mix of both
| lived location and worked location in various amounts by
| governments with a "claim" and with plenty of exceptions
| to go around. Consulting companies have had to deal with
| it forever (and states have "handled" forever), because
| you live in Miami, doing work for a company based in LA,
| and you travel to your client in NYC for 3 days a week
| for the whole year (60% of your income "generated"
| there). This is now a complicated Florida, New York,
| California scenario.
|
| So the choice isn't Big Brother companies who want to
| know where you are at all times and respectful companies
| who allow you to get your work done how you want. It's
| between companies who are following the applicable tax
| laws or those who are not. A company that is structurally
| opting to not follow laws seems untenable. A company is a
| legal construct in many ways. Whether or not the employee
| can commit something like tax fraud is perhaps a less
| interesting question, because, yeah, you can probably
| cheat on your taxes.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| That makes sense, but in the consulting case the employee
| has a motive to file expenses so the employer know. In
| this case it seems unreasonable for the employer to be
| heavily fined when they have no real way to determine
| their employees whereabouts. And because it would likely
| take an audit to catch the employee, when it does
| eventually happen it will be a larger hit to the
| business.
| smileysteve wrote:
| The error in your thinking is that many consultancies are
| aware of their legal nexus, and actively protect it, so
| ignorance is not a valid defense for any sensible
| company.
|
| Talk to people who work for a big consulting firm,
| they've been taking "tax holidays" for the last 70+ years
| to ensure they don't spend more than 50% of their time
| away from their home base.
|
| These companies are no fools; they wouldn't eat
| productivity and billable hours if they felt the state
| wouldn't care.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I get that the company wants to know and protect itself.
| I'm just not sure how they can after reading this
| article. Short of requiring all employees to check in
| physically periodically.
| treis wrote:
| Hey look! Another place where breaking the law can be a
| competitive advantage
| ska wrote:
| The problem isn't the company, it's typically the
| state/country.
|
| It's a compliance problem for the company, it's not about
| controlling their employees. From the employee point of
| view, it may put you on the wrong side of both visa and tax
| laws wherever you are sitting.
| speakfreely wrote:
| It's the employee's responsibility to maintain a current W-4
| to indicate their tax withholding, unemployment insurance
| obligations, and local liabilities. Employers who try to
| police this more than requiring employees to maintain up to
| date W-4 are just opening themselves up to liability they
| otherwise wouldn't need to suffer.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Requiring an updated W-4 does not subject an employer to an
| additional liability.
|
| Very importantly, _the employer is already subject to
| additional liability_ by the very fact of the employee
| working in another state /jurisdiction. It's irrelevant
| from the perspective of the employer's legal liabilities
| whether the employee goes through the formality of updating
| their W-4.
|
| But note that failure to update a W-4 after moving to
| another state or country is generally considered grounds
| for for-cause termination.
| Inhibit wrote:
| In the US we generally tax based on where you live, not where
| you temporarily reside. Federally if you're a US citizen
| you're welcome to live anywhere you'd like but the IRS will
| still require their payment.
|
| States are usually based around where you are more than half
| the year. But that's likely simple to show. If you're
| actually not there they don't have much of a complaint.
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| Nope.
|
| This gets really messy for consulting companies, where
| employees "work" at the client location 3-4 days a week,
| 2-3 weeks a month.
|
| We had to track and report what states we worked in and
| what days, down to the billing hours, and then in some
| cases had to file tax returns in some of those states.
|
| Also, all of the partners were required to file taxes in
| every state where the company earned income, which worked
| out to something like 46 states and 5 countries.
| bombcar wrote:
| Read up on the accounting required for baseball players.
| It's absolutely insane and sometimes comes down to "were
| they on the roster" or "in the stadium" or "on the
| lineup" and so forth.
| abduhl wrote:
| Income is taxed where it's generated in America, not based
| on residency (at the state level, the feds always get their
| pound of flesh). Many people don't follow this rule but
| it's smoothed over by reciprocal tax agreements between
| states. Companies are usually good about tracking this
| stuff and paying taxes appropriately, employees are usually
| not but the company pays the taxes correctly and so the
| employee lucks into doing their taxes correctly.
| Consultants will often find themselves confused after
| receiving a mean letter the first time they fuck this up
| because most people think as you do.
| mr337 wrote:
| Yeah, this whole bit is really confusing. Some states
| have tax agreements as well. I think Illinois and
| Arkansas has an agreement.
|
| Also eyeballing CA as they send us one of those mean
| letters you speak of. That was "fun" to sort out.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Each state has different rules. For one example Illinois
| doesn't tax remote workers of companies in Illinois who
| don't live in Illinois.
| bombcar wrote:
| Does _any_ state do that? I 'd think it could cause a
| civil war damn fast.
|
| The nexus is "where the work is performed" or "where the
| employee resides" and usually states have agreements with
| the neighboring states so it balances out.
| superdude12 wrote:
| New York State does this. No civil war so far.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Did you miss the part of covid where a bunch of multi-
| state commuters stopped commuting?
|
| https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/09/nj-remote-
| workers-ny...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Income is also taxed if it's generated outside America as
| long as you're an American citizen. Some people who
| emigrated to Europe as a child got quite a nasty tax bill
| for decades of untaxed income when the USA found out that
| they're still American citizens, for example.
|
| Many countries have tax law to deal with this type of
| American bullshit but it's still something to be aware
| of.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _In the US we generally tax based on where you live, not
| where you temporarily reside._
|
| Nope, sorry, completely wrong.
|
| You pay taxes to the states proportionately to how much
| time you spent in the state for the year. Many states don't
| even have a "floor" for how much time an employee works in
| a state before they're required to pay income and payroll
| taxes to that state, so in some states _even one day_
| working in that state triggers tax.
|
| Consulting firms track employees time spent in each state
| down to the hour so they can properly pay payroll taxes.
| Many consulting firms will even pay for tax return prep for
| employees required to work in other states long enough to
| trigger tax compliance.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _States are usually based around where you are more than
| half the year._
|
| Just live in 3 different states for ~33% of the year each
| and you don't have to pay state taxes? Must be easy in
| NY/NJ/CT. :)
| tenarshins wrote:
| Just live in a state with no income tax.
| [deleted]
| flerchin wrote:
| This is the same set of rules that Basketball players fall
| under. They played a game in $cityState, and that locality
| wants their cut.
|
| Granted, there's little way to tell if I'm working from the
| Grand Canyon, or touring it, but AZ still believes they should
| get their cut.
| gadders wrote:
| I don't think businesses care, other than issues with taxation
| if people start working from another country. It's the fault of
| tax services and governments.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| They care from a security perspective; good employees can
| become insider threats if they're in countries where the rule
| of law is weak.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Unless you're working for a defense contractor, in which
| case they aren't letting you WFH in the first place,
| foreign governments do not give a shit about your 'insider
| knowledge'
| smileysteve wrote:
| This is pretty naive to say on the same day that Okta was
| told they can't operate in certain regions.
|
| The SEC and Shareholders care if you go against NIST
| guidelines.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| OK, let me rephrase: as a senior manager within the
| broadly-defined technology security function of a large
| US company (that is not a defense contractor), I care, as
| does our board of directors.
| lardo wrote:
| I must be idealistic in expecting a senior manager to do
| better than "Do what you're told because we told you".
| gadders wrote:
| I don't think it's that. Supposing an employee had access
| to approve and pay invoices for a US company, and then
| moved to a country that had no extradition treaty with
| the US.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if there were worries about
| someone working from a sanctioned country as well. Would
| paying their wages break sanctions?
| panzagl wrote:
| So what I'm getting out of this is that the next time I'm on
| vacation out of the country and my employer calls to ask an
| 'urgent' question I should definitely ignore it so he doesn't get
| in trouble with the IRS.
| dangero wrote:
| I have been wanting to build a POC of a vpn product where you buy
| a kit with two little boxes that are plug n play:
|
| One you plug into the network in the location you are supposed to
| be, and the other you bring with you on your travels and plug
| your computer into over ethernet port. The one you bring with you
| can connect to any wifi or be hard wired. It has one job: tunnels
| all your data through vpn to the other box you left behind.
|
| Does this exist? Seems like there could be a market for it now.
| [deleted]
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| You have described a router with Wireguard on it, a pretty
| common configuration.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Not quite as simple as "two boxes" but there are a bunch of
| 'travel routers' that have vpn clients on them. They're totally
| transparent to your devices and your home router probably has a
| compatible vpn server on it.
| rschachte wrote:
| I don't think you need a box of any kind. Just tunnel into a
| server that is in the location you want it to be in and proxy
| traffic through that?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I think the assumption is that the work laptop has bossware
| or at least logs that get audited for that stuff.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem with a server is that it's detectable based on
| the source IP - if your employee suddenly starts appearing
| from a datacenter IP you might have to ask questions.
|
| This box allows them to build a virtual network cable back to
| their usual, _residential_ connection - completely invisible
| from the other side (besides latency, but this can be
| explained away).
| huimang wrote:
| You can simply run wireguard yourself, no devices needed
| other than your laptop and a server in your home.
|
| You can run wireguard on a raspberry pi (which are hard to
| source these days) or something like an HP SFF workstation
| which will run you ~$50 on ebay. Both of which are useful
| for other things asides from vpn tunneling.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I have messed around with this just using some simple
| routers. Works fine. You could also just leave the router
| at a friends house or family
| 0x457 wrote:
| Amplify Teleport was (is?) just that:
| https://amplifi.com/teleport . I think it's now software only.
|
| What you're describing is just a router + WireGuard. I have a
| server with WireGuard that acts as an exit node in tailscale
| network and RPi with WireGuard that acts as SoftAP that routes
| the entire WiFi network through that WireGuard connection.
|
| For this solution to be truly plug'n'play you need to figure
| out how to punch holes in NAT. Tailscale has ways of connecting
| two nodes even if both behind NAT and block UDP.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Pretty sure online poker players did a reverse version of this
| after it was made illegal in the US. They have a proxy out of
| the US, which they log into to play from inside the US.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| > Seems like there could be a market for it now.
|
| It would be easy enough to test it out if you had a sales
| channel in mind: give it a shot and if somebody wants to buy
| one, slap together something with Wireguard and two Raspberry
| Pis and build from there.
|
| The main problem I see is getting steady access to qualified
| leads, since I would assume "remote workers who are trying to
| hide that they are in the wrong country" is a particularly
| difficult cohort to track down reliably to market to. Honestly,
| if you could detect such people at scale, selling your system
| to HR departments may be a better business.
| BWStearns wrote:
| Tbh, there's probably a reddit for stealthy digital nomads
| and you could advertise there. Like r/overemployed but for
| unauthorized remote work.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Or just do Instagram ads to Millenials.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Seems like a VPN with extra steps? It allows me to travel but I
| also have to have an apartment in the place "I'm supposed to
| be" to leave a little box plugged in?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Everyone knows the address range commercial VPNs use.
| Plugging into an internet connection in a house or something
| bypasses that.
| mdrzn wrote:
| There's plently of VPNs that offer unique IPs, or
| mobile/LTE IPs to connect to, you don't necessarily need to
| connect to a datacenter or an "abused" residential address.
|
| But there's a potential for a business here: rent small
| spaces and offer to set up the small boxes for a fee.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| These exist. They will scan your physical mail and email
| it for you too. People who RV all the time use it.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| This is interesting and it sounds like you have
| experience in this area. Can you share specific examples
| of these services?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I cannot, a coworker who retired to do the RV thing was
| telling me about it. I think the one he was going to use
| was in one of the Dakotas
| gregcrv wrote:
| https://www.gl-inet.com/
| WalterBright wrote:
| The D language community is spread all over the world. Somehow,
| we manage to collaborate successfully!
| nomadthrow000 wrote:
| Time to tell my story!
|
| I work for a very large FAANG-type tech company. I am also a dual
| citizen, having US citizenship and a South American citizenship.
|
| A few months after the pandemic began, I relocated from my high
| CoL work city to a small South American city where my relatives
| live. I told my manager I was moving to another US state, which
| is my official address and where I also have relatives.
|
| It has been almost 2 years of this arrangement. In that time I
| believe exactly 0 people suspect I'm in a different country.
|
| I'm only somewhat careful with my arrangements. In video chats, I
| use a background blur and try my best to have neutral lighting.
| My audio setup focuses only on my voice and eliminates background
| noise.
|
| I don't take special networking precautions yet. If they check
| their logs they'd easily see my true location. However, I
| subscribe to StarVPN and I have a glinet router ready to go
| should I need to start spoofing my digital location. I have full
| confidence this will be enough.
|
| I pay ALL US taxes that I owe. Due to tax laws in the SA country
| I'm in, I have no reason to suspect I'm avoiding any taxes here
| either, but I'd have to consult with an accountant or expert to
| be sure.
|
| I'm not at all worried about my situation. I have yet to hear of
| a single case of someone in a similar position as me having it go
| south in a bad way. If my employer insists I go back to the US, I
| can spoof my location with the method I described above. How
| would they prove where I am otherwise? I've also been playing
| around with the idea of quitting and traveling a while anyway.
|
| I consider myself a very effective and productive engineer, and I
| subscribe to the "don't ask don't tell" policy in this situation.
| I'm surprised to see so much fear mongering and thinly veiled
| contempt for this here in HN. The total number of people doing
| this is likely extremely small anyway.
| [deleted]
| status200 wrote:
| It feels like all that extra work/stress to hide the deception
| would cancel out any benefit from being in any remote location,
| even considering the monetary/payroll arbitrage.
| veqq wrote:
| 0 stress or effort needed. But your purchasing power goes up
| 15x. When you rent a 3 bedroom beach house in Turkey for
| $450/month and the rest of your expenses don't exceed $1k but
| you're still getting 6 figures...
| aliqot wrote:
| A lot of these negative WFH articles read as if "maybe this next
| article will make them come back".
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| The media manipulation is obvious at this point. The quiet
| quitting meme is perpetuated as part of anti-WFH sentiment as
| well.
|
| It is clear that there's a power struggle playing out, where
| the Powers That Be desperately wish to pretend like Covid never
| happened, and the world never changed.
| ngc248 wrote:
| They were trotting out "quiet quitting" as some sort of a
| negative, when its just doing as much as you are paid for.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Is it not in their best interest to act quickly now and
| accumulate the best brains they can?
|
| Maybe I am wrong, but WFH seems to solve a whole lot of
| issues for businesses, and it's just middle and upper
| management not coping with it.
| asciimov wrote:
| Capital looses so much from people working from home.
|
| Easiest to notice is property values. They own or rent huge
| buildings that will loose value as the need for them
| decreases. That is capitalism 101.
|
| The bigger loss for Capital is leverage and control. If the
| employee is no longer bound by the shackles of working at a
| location, they loose the ability to pay them less, to lord
| over their time, to dictate their needs and will onto their
| employees. Suddenly Capital is forced to compete non-
| locally in a way they never had to before.
| [deleted]
| stemlord wrote:
| Right? Covid allowed my employer to offset so many costs
| onto me
| asciimov wrote:
| It's just another front in the current ongoing class war.
|
| News media has become the propaganda machine of the wealthy.
| asdff wrote:
| Has become? More like always was. Printing presses are not
| cheap.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Every modern identity platform tells you where your users are
| logging in from. Hiding it won't work for long if your company
| isn't in the stone ages.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| It's not a matter of hiding. Companies do not want to know.
|
| I guarantee that in many (likely the vast majority) of these
| cases someone in management is aware and is pursuing a don't
| ask don't tell policy because they don't want to deal with the
| fallout.
|
| It's _extremely_ common to work while on a visitor 's visa in
| another country, for example. I bet there is not a single
| manager reading this comment who has not had one of their
| employees send work emails while traveling internationally on a
| visitor's visa.
|
| I have several friends who are doing the digital nomad thing,
| working all over the world while ostensibly traveling on visas
| that prohibit work. If they officially asked HR, HR would be
| forced to officially tell them to not work. But they're never
| going to ask, and their direct managers are never going to
| report the situation.
|
| I know of several situations as well where the employee moved.
| The company response is pretty much universally "you can't do
| it so please don't tell us about it because if it's ever put in
| writing we have to act on it"
| jen20 wrote:
| Almost no tourist/business visas prevent working, almost all
| prevent employment in the country you are visiting.
| jeffwask wrote:
| > It's not a matter of hiding. Companies do not want to know.
|
| If a company doesn't want to know you shouldn't be doing
| business with that company.
|
| Sure some of these cases are John Doe wanting to live as a
| secret expat but not all.
|
| In a remote world, you have to know. There are numerous fake
| employee scams that have a number of different outcomes that
| present exactly in this manner.
|
| 1) Steal or forge a decent looking identity. 2) Have a face
| that interviews and attends some of the early weeks on camera
| then slides back to off camera 3) Profit whether it's theft
| or double-dipping or code farms
|
| This isn't a pretend scenario. It's active.
|
| Depending on your vertical and internal zero trust
| architecture a breach of this nature could be devastating.
|
| So sure, maybe that employee is lying about their location to
| soak a big salary under a cheap cost of living but maybe they
| are something much darker and you can't leave that stone
| unturned.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| "If a company doesn't want to know you shouldn't be doing
| business with that company."
|
| It's true of literally everyone you do business with, so
| good luck with that.
| justmestanding wrote:
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Within the EU, it would likely be considered an invasion of
| worker privacy (indiscriminate screening of where employees
| are logging in from).
|
| Even if it weren't an invasion of privacy, as you say,
| companies want to be able to point and say 'look, we have a
| policy, you aren't allowed!' and blame workers for breaking
| the rules rather than trying to solve the (admittedly
| complex) tax regulations about working outside the country
| you are normally employed in.
|
| But it's also convenient not to know.
| kube-system wrote:
| Sending an email on vacation is one thing. Setting up
| residency is something else entirely.
| sfvegandude wrote:
| Not to the country you're visiting. I had to attest to the
| German government that I would not send any emails or write
| any reports on my recent _work_ trip there. Else, I needed
| a work permit.
| kube-system wrote:
| I was careful not to say it was allowable to send emails
| on vacation from anywhere. Because, as you illustrate, it
| isn't.
|
| I am saying that magnitude of the problem will be
| significantly more if you lie about residency.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| They're degrees of the same thing. In my experience
| companies don't want to know about it if at all possible.
|
| In some cases working on a vacation is a more serious issue
| - I have heard stories of employees remote working from
| sanctioned countries and employers finding out after the
| fact.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _They 're degrees of the same thing._
|
| No; they're not. Intention often matters in immigration.
| If the purpose of your stay in a country is tourism, that
| is one thing. If the purpose of your stay is to work
| remotely then that is a different thing.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| We are talking about situations where the purpose is to
| work remotely on vacation. This is an extremely common
| scenario.
|
| As I said, it is a matter of degree.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Your original reply was to a post saying: _Sending an
| email on vacation is one thing. Setting up residency is
| something else entirely._
|
| Those do not have the same intention. In the first case,
| the email is incidental to the vacation. In the second
| case, the purpose is to work (which defies the claim to
| be "on vacation" in the first place).
|
| No-one is confused about whether they're going on a
| foreign vacation (taking vacation time, telling their
| colleagues they're not going to be available etc) and
| handling a few emails vs. setting out to work remotely
| from another country that might have a superior climate.
| The suggestion that these are the same thing based on
| observing that both involve work email in a foreign
| country is pretty obviously ridiculous.
|
| If you tell the immigration officer at the border that
| you're planning to work remotely with your tourist visa,
| they're going to put you on the first plane home.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| It sounds like you agree that these are all matters of
| degree.
|
| I don't see anything in your post that is in disagreement
| with what I said above.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yea, sending an email can be a big issue depending on the
| circumstances.
|
| But lying about full time residency is _always_ a big
| issue.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Of course.
|
| My point is that it's typically not a cloak and dagger
| situation described above, with an employee going to
| great technical lengths to hide their whereabouts.
|
| Generally speaking, the immediate manager is aware and is
| pursuing a policy of willful ignorance. Often when rumors
| percolate to HR, HR will very quietly say that they don't
| want to know and to clean it up so they don't ever have
| to.
|
| I don't know of any companies attempting to actively
| document this kind of thing. They don't want to know, and
| they'll only respond if they are forced to acknowledge
| the situation.
| kube-system wrote:
| Potentially the case, but this article was about two
| people who were going to great lengths to hide their
| whereabouts from their employers.
|
| > I don't know of any companies attempting to actively
| document this kind of thing.
|
| Well, not all companies tolerate casual lies, especially
| those that impact tax liability. At my organization,
| you'd be terminated for any willful lie in an instant
| based solely on a violation of trust... even if it didn't
| open the company to any tax or legal liability.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Certainly the official policy is that you'll be
| terminated. Almost every HR department would say this if
| asked.
|
| Reality is often different. Companies are diverse
| collections of many different people with a diversity of
| incentives who all enforce policies in very different
| ways. When these things happen there are many layers of
| management who will more often than not try to avoid the
| problem.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe at a large org. I don't work at a large org. There
| is no difference in official policy and effective policy
| in an org where they are both controlled by the same
| person (or by a few people who closely agree)
|
| Also, there are larger organizations where matters of
| trust are a critical part of the job, there are
| operational safeguards in place to account for lapses in
| trustworthiness, and concerns surrounding this are taken
| more seriously.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Sure. Every individual manager is different.
|
| I'm saying that, in general, this is extremely common
| throughout the industry.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| The article details the levels of active deception that one of
| these covertly-overseas employees has gone through, involving
| virtual environments and VPNs. The rare employees that are this
| determined are probably more determined than a compliance
| officer.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| I don't understand why "Matt" would talk to the press if he
| truly wanted to keep his deception secret. Because once he
| gets caught and narc'd on by his employer for obtaining a
| visa under fraudulent pretenses, with this article as
| evidence, his travel options are gonna get limited.
| gruez wrote:
| That can be bypassed by using a residential/LTE VPN. They're
| not as easy to get a hold of as regular VPNs, but if tens of
| thousands of dollars on the line I think tech workers can
| manage.
| izacus wrote:
| Which then turns this kind of adventure into deliberate (tax
| and other) fraud with all the consequences that might entail.
| asdff wrote:
| People in tech have already been doing stuff like working
| three jobs at once for decades. Sometimes these people will
| comment on here how they do all this juggling in their
| careers and keep each employer blind to the other. It's old
| hat that the tech worker will develop a way to squeeze more
| money out of their employers. Should be expected at this
| point.
| thwawaywfh3958 wrote:
| I've seen people go so far as to rent a SF apartment and
| setup a vpn to claim location based pay.
| jeffwask wrote:
| It all feels so very fragile. You are one forgetful moment
| from me seeing an alert for impossible travel.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| And then what? If you care more about compliance than the
| employee, you fire them and they do the same thing
| somewhere else a month later.
| jeffwask wrote:
| And... you don't think there are companies and leadership
| teams that think this way.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| there surely are, I just don't think its a big deal for
| any competent employee
| gruez wrote:
| Yes, of course. You'd want to claim that you're in the same
| state/country but live 200 miles away from company offices.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you set up your entire home network to tunnel back via
| the VPN, it's basically bulletproof. The failure mode would
| be "no connection", not a leak via the local, non-VPN'd
| connection. You can even maintain an actual air gap between
| the 2 networks with one device that handles the tunneling
| and exposes an ethernet port that's only ever bridged to
| the VPN interface, and the normal router's WAN port
| connected to that.
|
| I have such a setup - the local connections at the end-user
| sites are inexpensive consumer-grade connections (because
| they are cheaper and quicker to set up than a proper
| leased-line which has months of lead time, and you're not
| going to convince small restaurants/coffee shops that they
| need to spend 500 bucks/month for a leased line to serve
| public Wi-Fi) with various bullshit such as filtering,
| dynamic IP, etc - but the network hardware tunnels back to
| my infrastructure and abstracts away all the intermediary
| connections, giving them a "clean" Ethernet port. As a
| bonus, it can tolerate intermediary connections failing
| without dropping in-flight TCP connections, since those run
| over the tunnel rather than the raw interfaces which have
| gone down.
| ev1 wrote:
| There is a difference if it is your own vs corporate
| hardware: MDM can enable wifi remotely, then do a
| location scan against wifi networks nearby (ostensibly
| this is for theft purposes)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Or you can set up a personal VPN at your apartment. Just tell
| your AirBnB not to touch the computer in the closet.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Or you know just having a small room with a server rented
| that you ssh or vpn through. I think by the time an employer
| gets into such arms war with the employees, it's time to have
| a hard look in the mirror and see where the CEO is working
| from. I found that a little surprising and upsetting about
| CloudFlare for example. The CTO is working from a beach town
| in Portugal but regular employees are bound to a physical
| office. And this is 100% 'cloud' company where all your work
| is logging in remotely anyway.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| _I found that a little surprising and upsetting about
| CloudFlare for example. The CTO is working from a beach
| town in Portugal but regular employees are bound to a
| physical office._
|
| Well, that's a pile of shit and completely false.
| Everything about that is false. I'm in Lisbon not some
| "beach town" (unless you're counting the capital of
| Portugal as a beach town). Employees have a huge amount of
| flexibility on using the Lisbon office or not.
|
| _And this is 100% 'cloud' company where all your work is
| logging in remotely anyway._
|
| Not so sure about that. First meeting I have tomorrow
| morning is in person with member of the team in Portugal in
| the office. It's true that I have a lot of video calls, but
| not really a surprise given that Cloudflare has offices all
| over the world. We have more than 200 employees in Portugal
| and I'd guess around 40 in the office at any one time.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| To be fair, Lisbon is both the capital of Portugal and
| also sortof a beach town.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yeah but we have more than 200 employees here. It's not
| like I'm all alone!
| zen_1 wrote:
| Nah, this must all be an elaborate ruse to distract us
| from the armies of cloudflare devs chained to their
| laptops in some desert.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Gotta love it when someone gets slapped down by the
| person they are talking shit about.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I just don't understand what would make someone claim
| that. It's oddly specific but totally wrong.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Do you have an HN Alert about "Cloudflare" appearing in
| comments?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yes. I have my own mechanism for various things on HN and
| I get emailed about comments.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| What's upsetting about an employer and employee agreeing on
| a working arrangement? If you want to work from a beach
| town in Portugal, negotiate it.
| pzh wrote:
| If you ask your employer to work from Lisbon as opposed
| to SF, you'll likely get a 3x-5x reduction in total
| compensation. I doubt Cloudflare (or any other) CEO's
| compensation will get the same readjustment for cost of
| living if he moves from the SF office to the Lisbon
| office.
| pessimizer wrote:
| For some people that seems like negotiating an agreement
| with your employer about changing your hairstyle, or
| buying a new tv.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Then find an employer who thinks the same way. If you
| agree to work for a company that says "your place of
| employment is X" then you'd better be OK with that.
| Anything is just rationalization.
| justmestanding wrote:
| mistrial9 wrote:
| US/Western capital has maxed out every kind of cross-border
| international tax "savings" you could imagine - it is so well
| known that Saturday night television comedians can joke about it
| and people laugh because they know what it means.
|
| Now that some thousands of tech workers get tax-cheating
| benefits, it is the subject of solemn hand-wringing here? I call
| BS
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| We did an audit and found out one of our employees was logging in
| from a war zone. He was hired in the US but at some point after
| being hired, moved to a country that is considered by the US
| government to be an enemy. For security reasons, we couldn't
| allow this to continue, especially since he was part of our
| security organization. We do have contract workers in South
| America and some "regular" workers in Canada and Western Europe
| but now we have a policy that those are the only countries where
| it is acceptable to work from unless special permission is given
| ahead of time.
| kyleee wrote:
| that employee should have setup a VPN, shame
| abigail95 wrote:
| I've run into this before and it's a massive PITA.
|
| Think you're doing business with someone in Turkey and they
| might be in Iran/Syria?
|
| Because of "facilitation" I can't even tell them who to deal
| with to get what they want done, unless I'm a lawyer providing
| legal advice (I think).
| mrtksn wrote:
| Abroad often means exploiting cost of living arbitrage. Working
| in a US company with a US salary and living let's say in Portugal
| or Turkey or Thailand, means that suddenly your compensation for
| the work you do becomes multiple times more potent. If you remove
| the money as intermediary, it essentially means that for the
| JavaScript button you created maybe you could have a meal but now
| you secure your weekly food.
|
| This is great but most people can't simply move because countries
| for some reason decided that only capital moves, people stay put
| and work and if they really really want to move they need to go
| though months long of bureaucracy and it's not even available for
| most people.
|
| This imparity between people breaks the natural tendency of
| equalisation and the arbitrage remains and creates political
| tensions because suddenly some services see unnatural demand,
| especially housing is particularly badly hit.
|
| Effectively some people get particularly good compensation thanks
| to the arbitrage when other people who might be working just as
| hard and could be jast as important for the function of the
| society get screwed if they can't work from home and miss out on
| the arbitrage and can't move to the higher paying places because
| they are only(!) human capital.
|
| So my argument is, I guess, this should be prevented from
| happening or the WFH from abroad people should be treated as
| local workers and pay taxes to to the host country. Ideally,
| anyone should be free to work and live wherever they like but
| since we are in a deglobalisation trend I have no hopes for it.
| So yes, WFH from abroad should be actually international workers
| and taxed accordingly.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You'll find yourself in a world of hurt working remotely in a
| country you lack a work visa in. Getting caught is another
| matter entirely, but I assume they'll come down on them
| eventually, probably by offering an incentive to citizens to
| report them.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is a huge part of it; if your group of locals likes you
| and is on your side, you'll probably be fine.
|
| But if you piss off the wrong person, you could have a hell
| of a time (depending on the country, even spending time in
| jail).
|
| And the US embassy may not be inclined to help depending how
| blatant you were about it.
|
| Luckily, the more likely jail time is the more likely you can
| just bribe the right person, but again, you need the locals
| on your side to tell you who that is.
| smileysteve wrote:
| To agree; if you're quiet, don't use up too much bandwidth,
| parking, or have visitors you might stay under the radar;
| But maybe you have a rent dispute, maybe you party too hard
| one night, maybe someone at your pub doesn't like that you
| cheer for the other team.
|
| You're a blackmail target like anybody else doing something
| baseline illegal.
| petronio wrote:
| Why do you expect them to crack down? The intent of
| disallowing working on tourist visas is to protect the local
| labor market. Digital nomads work for foreign companies and
| don't get location based market benefits that would be
| restricted to locals (consensus among the various communities
| seems to be that having local clients was a big no-no), so
| they add no pressure to local labor markets. In regards to
| the local economy, digital nomads are nothing but tourists.
|
| Rather than cracking down, the current direction is
| legalization. Countries where digital nomads are common know
| what's happening and they ignore it as it's beneficial to
| them and are now legalizing to get an even larger slice of
| the pie (by attracting those who were previously fearful).
|
| Others have mentioned the issue of housing stock, but regular
| tourists are actually more inefficient in that regards (very
| seasonal and short stays. Think about how many empty room-
| days most hotels have).
| moconnor wrote:
| If you're working remotely in the EU, you are treated like a
| local worker with respect to taxes etc. this can cause issues
| if your employer doesn't have a legal entity in the country,
| which a whole range of third-parties will solve for a cut until
| employment and taxation law catches up with the 21st century.
|
| Source: living and working in the EU for employers from other
| countries for 15 years.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Maybe this is just a sign that income taxes are an outdated way
| to have people that use your local services pay for them? Sales
| tax at least has shipping destination to go on.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In many countries where enforcing income tax is hard, they do
| that. Often they still have income tax but since no one pays
| it, they try to collect it through VAT and other means.
| That's how you have very expensive iPhones in poor countries.
| It's not fun.
| mzi wrote:
| Sales tax is a tax that hits low income households harder,
| since they consume a higher portion of their income. And it's
| impossible to have a progressive sales tax.
|
| So switching from income tax to sales tax would transfer
| money from the relatively poor to the relatively rich.
| rcoveson wrote:
| > And it's impossible to have a progressive sales tax.
|
| It may not have been done before but it's not impossible,
| right? You pay 5% on the first 10k you spend in a year, 12%
| on the next 30k, 20% on the next 50k, etc.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Aren't luxury taxes and exemptions on necessities an
| attempt at this as well?
| jacknews wrote:
| Is this the same as when companies pay remote workers in poorer
| countries much less?
|
| Or even set up whole factories in poorer countries to save
| costs, but still charge the same price in the rich 'home'
| country?
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's not. You can't simply employ foreigners, you won't be
| able to do the administrative work and you can easily get
| into trouble for employing illegals.
|
| So when companies pay remote workers, they often have a
| representation in that country. This usually means(depending
| on the country) that the American company that "employs"
| these remote workers actually pay money to a company in the
| poor country and that company pays the local taxes and the
| workers. There are companies specialising in this, so they
| setup companies in many countries and when you hire a remote
| worker from legal point of view the worker actually works for
| this intermediary and pays local taxes. Another popular
| option is, to setup your own company and do the same thing
| but skip the middleman.
|
| When you setup factories in poor countries, that's considered
| an investment. Again, you setup a local company that is fully
| or partly owned by the you(depending on the country, there
| are restrictions) and that local company pays local taxes and
| operates in accordance to the local laws. When you bring the
| produce home to sell at American prices, you import that as
| if you are importing it from any other foreign company.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I make money doing exactly that, paying whoever, whatever,
| wherever.
|
| I don't know how it could be simpler.
|
| Just as you can buy goods from any country via purchase
| order and pay via invoice, you can do the same with labor.
|
| The only administrative work involved is the rules required
| of the entity buying the labor. Plus local rules that
| constrain my personal interactions with the company, if me
| and the entity aren't in the same jurisdiction.
|
| If I'm in the USA, I have to mind the SDN list, if I'm in
| Singapore I don't.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > It's not. You can't simply employ foreigners, you won't
| be able to do the administrative work and you can easily
| get into trouble for employing illegals.
|
| Tangent: Most countries do technically allow foreign
| companies to directly and legally become employers in their
| country without having to involve any kind of additional
| legal employer entity, and in many cases such branches (as
| they're called) of the foreign entity can do the required
| formalities to legally employ foreigners. But yeah, there
| are usually significant compliance and liability/financial
| downsides to the branch approach. S most multinational
| companies do tend to prefer one of the two approaches you
| describe.
|
| > So when companies pay remote workers, they often have a
| representation in that country. This usually
| means(depending on the country) that the American company
| that "employs" these remote workers actually pay money to a
| company in the poor country and that company pays the local
| taxes and the workers. There are companies specialising in
| this, so they setup companies in many countries and when
| you hire a remote worker from legal point of view the
| worker actually works for this intermediary and pays local
| taxes. Another popular option is, to setup your own company
| and do the same thing but skip the middleman.
|
| Although you're right about this, the cost to the employer
| of such an intermediary company is hundreds of USD per
| intermediated employee per month, nowhere near the typical
| reduction in compensation for that employee for being in a
| poor country rather than a rich country. So it isn't the
| full explanation.
|
| My take is it's honestly mostly just companies getting away
| with what they can get away with, in the usual economics
| supply-and-demand system. Hiring obstacles haven't yet
| forced most companies to change their definition of their
| labor market into "anyone who can somehow legally work for
| us (whether directly or indirectly) during work hours that
| overlap sufficiently with our core hours and without
| causing us to incur unreasonable compliance and/or travel
| expenses." They still set compensation using a per-location
| definition of the market based on who can commute to an
| office that no longer exists in the context of a remote
| worker.
|
| Of course, switching to a truly remote-first labor market
| definition would probably involve paying lower salaries
| than the current SF and NYC market norms, at least in the
| tech industry. This makes correct compensation a
| complicated question for employers, when they recognize the
| remote-first labor market reality but also want to hire the
| top-notch caliber of employee who often chooses to live in
| such major tech hubs. But equally, such employees
| increasingly want the higher disposable income after
| adjusting for cost of living that allows them to take a
| slightly lower salary in other cities or countries and
| still come out ahead. So this just means that a transition
| to a remote-first definition would involve some iterative
| adjustments on both sides as a new economic equilibrium
| shakes out. We're probably in the first stages of this now.
|
| Last note: It is true that benefits like health insurance
| and social security contributions will usually continue to
| vary in nature and magnitude based on local country norms;
| however, one of the countries where these (especially
| health insurance) are usually priciest is the USA, which
| also has the highest salaries, so people who try to use
| this variation as an excuse for salary differentials are
| either confused about the data or being disingenuous.
| jacknews wrote:
| Well I agree that tax is an issue, and workers shouldn't
| just relocate without taking that into account, but your
| argument seemed mostly concerned that they were "exploiting
| cost of living arbitrage.".
|
| Yet this is exactly what companies do when they employ
| foreign workers or manufacture in poorer countries and sell
| those products/services at full price in their home
| countries.
| mrtksn wrote:
| From that perspective, I agree but the dynamics are
| different.
|
| "Rich" people moving into your neighbourhood is very
| different from rich people setting up a factory in your
| neighbourhood.
|
| Both have positive and negative impacts but for the
| workers rich people moving into your neighbourhood is
| almost exclusively negative but if a foreign company sets
| up business in your neighbourhood its more of a mixed
| bag.
|
| Exploiting the arbitrage is how arbitrage is removed so
| it is a good thing in principle, notice how the poor
| countries seize being poor after rich countries invest in
| them and produce all the stuff for cheap.
|
| My problem is with the limits on who exploits that
| arbitrage. Workers are the most limited bunch with very
| little prospect to benefit from the arbitrage.
| jacknews wrote:
| Rich people coming to your country and bringing money is
| tourism. It's often a much better deal for the local
| population than a polluting factory intent on paying the
| most meager wages possible; often the reason they're even
| there, after all.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Nope, Tourism has some benefits but it destroys local
| communities. In many places in Europe there are movements
| against tourism. Google for "Tourists go home" and start
| digging from there. The gist is, only the business and
| property owners directly benefit from it and the economy
| created from it often don't offset the troubles it
| creates to the locals.
|
| Factories are a different situation, they are a necessary
| evil if we would like not to go back living in the woods.
| Rich or poor, countries need factories and the pollution
| they create can and is managed. Not in poor, but in
| corrupt countries factories can create problems but other
| than that they are a good thing.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I'm in Cozumel as I write this. I assure you they love
| tourism.
| jacknews wrote:
| Too much tourism, and the way it's funneled through
| designated channels, can negatively impact communities,
| indeed, as everything gets gentrified, and deployed for
| tourist duty.
|
| Too many factories? An absolute blessing, no doubt. lol.
| Seriously, they completely warp and devastate rural
| communities, which are left with only old people. You can
| argue that everyone is getting richer etc, but that's not
| really true. Land prices increase dramatically as foreign
| 'investment' comes in, forcing people out of the
| countryside, and into factories just to afford food,
| which previously they could grow themselves, share, or
| just forage.
|
| Having a few rich foreign workers around could well be
| the catalyst for them to realize they're getting screwed
| and should raise their prices, collectively, and those
| connections could also be the means to do so.
|
| I also think the 'cost of living' is misunderstood.
|
| In many poorer countries, the _cost_ of living is much
| lower, because the _standard_ of living is much lower.
|
| To live a western level family existence is often _more_
| expensive in poorer countries than in rich countries
| (probably excl. US), once you factor in security,
| education, health, imports, etc, etc.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| It seems precisely the same. But now it is a problem, because
| it benefits the worker instead of the business and
| country/state.
| rtev wrote:
| Either way, it seems like both are morally wrong. Each is
| predatory in a different direction.
| [deleted]
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| I don't necessarily "live" in other countries, but I and a decent
| chunk of my friends go on extended stays (45-60 days is usually
| how long my stays end up being before returning to the US) in
| other countries and I have wondered if this would incur the same
| tax implications. Technically I'm really just on an extended
| vacation in my mind but work during normal working hours. So far
| I also have just worked off of the "don't as don't tell" policy
| and haven't run into any snags.
|
| My employers security team has even caught on once or twice but I
| just say yeah I'm vacationing since my stays have usually been
| along the lines of 45-60 days or so at a time in a given country.
|
| I still have and maintain my home address in the US, pay the rent
| and everything there, and I do return usually for a month or two
| at a time. Most of my friends do this as well or have a situation
| setup where they use their parents address and stay with their
| parents when back in the US for chunks of time.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| How about insurance. On work I guess you are insured. But if
| you have an accident somewhere else, what then.
|
| In Switzerland there had been cases with, where the insurance
| wouldn't pay (broken leg after falling on stairs), because some
| parts of the house do not count as WFH.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| That's not in CH as the mandatory accident insurance is
| covering both professional and non-professional accidents.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| You are right, not Switzerland but Germany.
|
| https://www.manager-magazin.de/karriere/homeoffice-sturz-
| auf...
| ska wrote:
| This could definitely blow up in your face, as "don't ask don't
| tell" isn't really a thing. I don't know what the probability
| is, but I know people who explicitly maintain the 183 day
| records to avoid it.
|
| On your companies side, it could also create all sorts of
| problems that nobody is really clear how to handle. I suspect
| this will get a lot more regulated _if_ it becomes more common.
| bvoq wrote:
| still worth risking for a better life
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Generally, getting caught WFH in another country results in
| immediate termination. For cause, because working in
| another country creates an entire set of legal, financial,
| and tax consequences that the employer may not be aware of
| or prepared for.
| ska wrote:
| Why does it have to be a risk? Are you assuming there is no
| above-board way of doing this?
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you do everything by the book, it's really hard -
| practically impossible to do fully legally.
|
| Most countries won't issue you a work permit without a
| lot of paperwork, cost, and time. Think 'send your
| passport off to the embassy for 3 months' type hassle...
|
| And most employers don't want to employ someone abroad.
| Employment law varies widely by country, and unless they
| already have an office in that country they don't want to
| do all the tax and reporting stuff for only you.
|
| Long term abroad in one country might be doable, but 30
| days in each country is pretty much impossible.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| But for example in my case, I do still come back to my
| home country for decent chunks of time that still adds up
| to around half the year. I'm working for a US company and
| every country I have visited thus far mention it's
| perfectly fine to stay and work for some amount of time
| (usually 90 days) as long as it's not displacing a local
| job. I'm not a tax expert or anything but I don't see
| what the issue is here or why I'd need a work permit in
| the first place?
| bombcar wrote:
| Because you're usually on a tourist visa and those will
| say something about "not working" with varying language.
| Since your "working" looks identical to "dicking around
| on a laptop" it's unlikely to draw attention, but if you
| were to piss off the right person at the wrong time, they
| might be able to drop a train on you (but even then the
| most likely thing is being kicked out of the country, but
| some countries could get very "spicy").
|
| Of course, if you were a rock star coming in to perform,
| they'd definitely want their cut even if you were only
| performing for a day. The laws haven't advanced to cover
| this situation entirely well, so there's a lot of leeway
| on what you can get away with.
| [deleted]
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You are (generally, it's a complex subject) not liable
| for taxes in a country unless you're resident. The
| country where you are resident (or resident last if you
| don't qualify for residence anywhere in the current year)
| will want taxes on your worldwide income.
| ska wrote:
| You don't generally need a work permit though, unless you
| are taking a job with a local employer. Generally they
| will have rules for how long you can stay in the country
| while working for a foreign employer. As long as you
| maintain tax residency wherever you are "from" nobody
| bats an eye.
|
| If what you really want to do is live and work in one
| country while pretending that you live and work in
| another one, I don't see why either country should
| facilitate that.
|
| It's easy enough to do that "properly" too, form a
| company or self-employed tax status in the country you
| are living in, and invoice the company in the country you
| work for. Then they aren't in a compliance issue and you
| are paying taxes where you work and live.
|
| What's the problem?
| em-bee wrote:
| _Generally they will have rules for how long you can stay
| in the country while working for a foreign employer._
|
| only if they offer something like a digital nomad visa.
| otherwise, usually you are not allowed to do any work at
| all on a tourist visa, even if it's remote work to your
| home country. nobody cares if you check your work email
| or do some small stuff, but technically no work is
| allowed.
|
| _form a company or self-employed tax status in the
| country you are living in_
|
| in most countries you can't do that as a foreign citizen
| unless you have a proper visa for that. you can probably
| open a company in a foreign country, but you likely still
| need a work visa to actually work for your own company.
| otherwise anyone would just go to open a company just so
| they can live and work in that country.
| ska wrote:
| You can, for example, do work in US under a B1 with
| permission; this isn't a digital nomad visa.
|
| It's true you can't necessarily do what you want, where
| you want. That's fine though, no?
|
| > unless you have a proper visa for that
|
| Yes, that is part of doing it "properly", I should have
| been clearer.
|
| My point was that there are mechanisms for doing all of
| this stuff; someone may not like the mechanisms but
| that's not the same as them not existing.
| soneil wrote:
| We've been looking at this. We're both in the EU, my partner is
| from a LCOL country, I'm from a HCOL country, we're both living
| in the latter.
|
| We've been looking at getting property in her homeland, with
| the goal to enjoy the better summers there. But for, say 4
| months a year. Hopefully enough time that I can start to learn
| the language and such, and she can enjoy better ties to her
| family - while remaining tax-resident here as to not rock the
| boat.
|
| I'm curious what concerns your security team would have? Is it
| just that you'd rather the situation go under the radar and
| they're the most likely to spot the changes - or do they have
| concerns of their own?
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Security team was just checking that it was actually me in
| terms of the location I was in being off. But they didn't
| make much of an issue after I simply confirmed that yes this
| is actually me.
|
| But outside of that one time, I basically don't disclose
| where I am.
|
| My GF isn't tied to a location since she does mostly
| freelancing/contracting and makes it known she will
| not/should not be expected to be in a single location and
| gets away with that just fine. So I basically just started
| joining her in her travels the past few years.
|
| I'm pretty set in that I would simply quit if my company ever
| demanded I go back home and stay there.
| soneil wrote:
| Well that sounds like a personally sensible concern on
| their part.
|
| I'm not sure going back to the office would be the end of
| the world for me, but I can see which way the wind's
| blowing - we're already in the process of downscaling the
| site because the demand just isn't there. I believe the
| most we've had onsite since this all began was approx 15%.
|
| The position I'm in - my GF wants to eventually move back
| home, neither of us have family here, the wage is our only
| tie. So it's seeming completely logical to me, to use our
| new-found flexibility to ease that transition for both of
| us. We've always figured on retiring there, but a head-
| start on the language and the property ladder make sense to
| me, and being closer to her family for a third of the year
| instead of just christmas, is a huge win for her.
|
| All the news seems to focus on people wanting to use this
| to live the high life. Just wanted to share my position to
| show there's some huge non-monetary value in this too.
| collegeburner wrote:
| tax and compliance concerns are very real. employees need to be
| transparent so they can personally shoulder the overhead of
| additional compliance along with all taxes incurred.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sometimes "don't ask, don't tell" is the best policy.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I was in a situation recently where I
| needed to WFH from another state for family reasons. I was very
| honest with my employer about what was happening and why, and
| gave it plenty of notice.
|
| The company wouldn't allow it, for very understandable tax
| reasons. But my family is more important to me than any
| company. That's the way human beings are supposed to live their
| lives.
|
| I ended up resigning. The week before I moved, my boss left me
| a voice mail asking if I could hold off on my job search
| because the previous-inflexible directors of the company were
| going to try to work something out. Eventually they did, and
| now allow anyone in certain positions to work remotely.
|
| It turned out that the company had lost several other employees
| in the previous weeks over remote work, and based on the long
| list of open positions on the company's web site, it's having
| trouble replacing people.
|
| This is the only time in my life when a good number of
| employees have had more sway over their jobs than their bosses.
| It's good to see people everywhere taking advantage of this (in
| a good way), and leveling the playing field with their
| companies.
|
| Employment is a two-way street. It's not servitude. This is a
| once-in-a-generation opportunity to alter society in a way that
| favors people over profit.
| jen20 wrote:
| It doesn't though: profits for lots of companies during the
| pandemic were at all time highs, as was productivity. Remote
| work favors people who deliver, and not those who play
| politics or like to use the office to keep up social
| appearances!
|
| So both profit and people are addressed by more remote work!
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Registering for payroll tax in another state is generally
| very straightforward, and carries minimal additional income
| tax consequences (unless the employee at issue is an
| executive).
|
| If the company uses a payroll services provider like ADP, it
| really is as easy as having the legal department register for
| payroll tax (and unemployment tax, if that is a separate
| registration in that state), a roughly 15-30 minute process,
| and providing the relevant ID numbers to ADP.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| It's not just about payroll - there are all other kinds of
| employment-related laws that must be complied with which
| are set at a state level. For example, minimum required
| vacation time, sick leave, minimum wage, employment
| contracts (e.g. restrictive covenants), required
| reimbursement for employment-related costs.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| A lot of those laws don't kick in if you've only got a
| single employee in-state; there is usually a threshold
| before an out-of-state employer is subject to those laws.
| The threshold is usually 10 employees, but it varies by
| state, and can even vary by the size of the employer, so
| I left this out.
|
| However, payroll compliance and unemployment kick in with
| a single employee. There is no minimum threshold.
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