As far as I know there is no legal way to be a digital nomad.
You have to live about 6months in the same country at the very least.
You have to live about 6months in the same country at the very least.
Also false. Depends on the tax laws of the countries, but most likely you wouldn’t be considered tax resident anywhere, absent of having a strong economic interests in one particular country (and tax havens wouldn’t care about this, and the burden of proof would be on the tax authority).
In Singapore, tax non-residents simply pay a different rate. To be exempt from income tax entirely, you need to work in Singapore for fewer than 60 days.
https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...
Say a hypothetical scenario, I’m self-employed contractor working through a corporation in, say, Panama, and I spend some 120 days a year in Singapore.
Would Singapore even subject me to any taxes?
But yes, ultimately one can be a digital nomad, not be a tax resident anywhere, and not be subject to any income or corporate taxes anywhere. You just have to be very particular about the countries you pick.
Would they know? Probably not.
Just outlining the complexity of this.
They define it by “where the work was completed” not “where income come from” or “country where you were hired”.
Many countries do it that way.
Edit: I misread. Well if your Corp doesn’t pay you I see the point, but you’re also the sole owner?
How would you eventually obtain beneficial use of that money? Ie how and when would it reach your personal bank account? If it won’t, how do you plan to use the money for your own gain? I assume (haven’t done any research) that Panama wouldn’t let you treat things like paying for Netflix, movie tickets, supermarket shops, clothes shops, etc as business expenses?
At some point you’d need to transfer it from Panama to yourself and at that point it would be taxable (capital gains or income tax depending on how you transfer). If you time things right you could be resident in a country without income tax eg UAE. But you would have still paid Panama corporation tax I believe.
The US is the exception here, not the norm.
That is incorrect. This is actually the norm in most countries in the world.
> Most countries actually don’t care about you working on a tourist visa, as long as it’s incidental to the travel
But it's not
> and the work is online.
The work being online just makes it better hidden and thus a more difficult fraud to detect but it has no incidence on the legality of the work.
Generally speaking, events, meetings, etc. are fine in many countries with just a basic visitor's visa. (US, it needs to be a B-1 Business visa.)
However, as you point out, remote online work is hard to police. That said, you shouldn't say that remote work is the reason for your visit. And you should be somewhat discrete--e.g. not renting a co-working space.
Second, countries are likely to err on the side of caution which benefits them, so if you have unusual arrangements, then it's quite plausible that you are a tax resident of multiple countries and owe taxes to all of them - many countries have bilateral treaties to avoid dual taxation (which is the default outcome in many cases), so a digital nomad in an unusual situation might owe taxes to two or more countries, but are very unlikely to owe tax to no country.
"the burden of proof would be on the tax authority" - no, definitely not. The tax laws generally assert their claim on all income accrued in a certain country. The abovementioned 'non-dual-taxation' treaties have a process so that in reasonable scenarios the worker only pays tax in their home country, but if they don't apply (for example, because the 'home country' is a tax haven with whom there such a treaty isn't made), they owe tax where they earned the income. The mere fact that you are a tax resident somewhere else does not mean that you're exempt from local taxes, that requires fulfilling the criteria of those dual taxation treaties.
The weak point there is enforcement - there are all kinds of ways how a digital nomad can ensure that they won't be hassled much to collect the taxes they owe and they often can avoid paying them - but legally, they still owe them and are at the mercy of the authorities not finding out or not caring.