How Moving to Work Remotely Could Affect Your Taxes | Hacker News Reader

How Moving to Work Remotely Could Affect Your Taxes

nytimes.com

20 pointsmgav11 comments

How would anyone know you have been working out of state / out of country? Has anyone been caught out by being tracked by their ip address when logging into the corporate VPN?

You could get away with that, yes. Until you do something that causes your employer to change the address that goes on your W-2.

I’m thinking more of where you still retain your original address but work abroad or out of state for a bit. If you did actually change address I suppose that would muddy waters as correspondence would be sent to the old address.

For a bit isn't the issue. It is when your primary residence changes.

Each country has different rules around how this happens and the legal definition of a primary residence.

For most cases this is automatically triggered when you haven't spent 6 months out of the year at what you're claiming to be your primary residence.

I wonder what happens if you haven't spent 6 months at any one address. Do they just take wherever you spent the most time?

Unless its a multiple houses in the same state situation, then they usually just make a decision that is the worse one for you / most money for them and you have to prove otherwise.

There are other key things they look.

Let's say you travel 80% of the year for work.

- Where is your work located? - Where is your employment state your primary residence is? - Does your partner live where you're claiming to be your primary residence? - Do you have kids that you can make the case that the place is your primary residence? - Are you stating your primary residence in another country & can provide proof you're paying taxes there (Ok, this is different for the USA)

You get the point, they look at the factors and honestly the government doesn't pay much attention to this unless they think you're evading taxes that you should be paying.

FWIW, the US federal government receives bulk cellphone location data from the tower owners.

Whether or not they let the IRS use it is another matter, but the data is there.

Perhaps it is time for the IRS to take a great leap forward and start thinking beyond its territorial power to collect revenue -- and start thinking about the post-millenia reality of nomads, transnationals, solopreneurs, cloud-based operators, and globalized utility models of work, and work out a new equitable model of taxation.

The issue is with Congress, not the IRS. The IRS simply fulfills its mandate encoded in statute enacted by Congress.

Keep in mind, the folks you mention (“nomads, transnationals, solopreneurs, cloud-based operators“) are a minority in the US, and will continue to be so even into the future. I know many expats who navigate US tax code without too much trouble, although there is room for streamlining revenue accounting and collection mechanisms.

Borders, customs, and immigration forms, fingerprints, cameras, and passports, airline tickets. There are much of paper trails

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