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Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

My impression is that if you are an employee, you are typically hired by local company in country you live. This local company will be structured as a subsidiary of the US corporation. So US taxes are irrelevant.

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That's completely not the case much of the time. Frequently, non-US-citizen remote people are hired as contractors rather than permenant employees. Otherwise, it gets ridiculous -- I hire a Serbian guy and a Ukrainian guy and a French guy -- that would, under your scenario, require 3 different subsidiaries and all of the bureaucratic nonsense that would entail -- opening a French subsidiary, for exsample would be next to hell in terms of trouble -- especially for an American company with no physical presence in the country. No way. Most companies would never do it that way.

The best and easiest way is to simply hire the "employee" as a consultant/contractor -- then that person can handle taxes/etc however they need to. For example, what if you're a Serbian citizen working remotely from Thailand for a US company while getting paid into an EU bank account?

It gets ridiculous in a hurry -- unless you're paying remote overseas employees as independent contractors.

Can they not be simply hired as a foreign worker? Then the employee would pay taxes wherever they are a resident?

Does the location of the bank account matter?

That's why I said "if you are hired as an employee". Choices are contractor or local employee, you're never a US employee.

So, there is a no way you could be a regular (non-contractor employee) of a US company if you are living outside the US? How does companies like Github and Stripe, who have a lot of remote employees work?

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