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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

Okay. How about this: Try to open a bank account in a different EUR country and see how it goes.

I'm a bit mocking, because it is such a silly trait among many (mainly Northern) Europeans to have a total thrall mentality when it comes to their banks.

In the real world, there is no problem at all for you to open a EUR account in a number of foreign EUR banks. Your employer pays to an IBAN account just like if you had a national bank. Your income is declared just as normal, because it doesn't matter one bit in which country the bank account is and tax authorities don't ask. That's how it functions in reality, and people claiming anything else are either uninformed or just spreading their mommies old boogey man tales.

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My employer told me they will only pay to a local account, i.e. an IBAN that starts with that specific ISO country code. (This isn't hypothetical, I know this firsthand, and so do coworkers.) Now what? No one is going to hassle their employer about such legalities for the sake of getting the kind of mobile OS they demand, and especially not just to satisy a crank on HN who likes to talk about "thralls" like some American Libertarian on nineties Usenet.

Moreover, you aren't considering that some countries have BankID systems for everything from tax matters to accessing healthcare, and that only works with a local bank account (so much so that people moving from other EU countries are commonly shut out of everything for weeks until their local bank ID comes through).

You can push back against your employer. They are not superior to you in this negotiation, and you are wrong to call it "legalities". Your employer doesn't make the law. I successfully pushed back against a big corporate employer way back in the days when I was just a kid at the lowest rung, and they agreed to pay my salary in hard cash instead of a bank wire. So that could be an answer to your "Now what?".

People may prefer a foreign bank for any and every good reason besides mobile OS nerding, and that's nobody's business. Certainly not your employers business.

As for BankID, I know of it and it might just as well be called ThrallID from how ridiculous and pathetic it is that people would let their IDs be controlled and owned by private banks. You must admit that it's nothing to be proud of.

You can also keep your national bank account for your salary and ThrallID if you want to, and just transfer all your money to a foreign account every time you get your paycheck. That way your money is also a whole lot safer, and you get some better peace of mind.

"When you were just a kid" implies several decades ago. The economy was much different back then.

You seem to fail to understand that every country has a different regulation. First of all, in a lot of countries it is mandatory to have traced payments, so no cash can be involved. Then, every country has different taxation. A lot of EU countries tax you just because you have a foreign bank account.

Also, theory and practice are very different. While I agree you can fight back for your rights, I remember having contacted different kind authorities for 7 months because a company was rejecting my SEPA IBAN. Unfortunately, that was the only company I could use for that mandatory service, and after they got fined, they happily continued accepting only national IBANs.

The result has been months of frustration, endless calls/appointments with authorities to gain nothing. If I could go back, I would give them a different IBAN, even if on a theory level they were wrong.

You have the right to be paid in cash. If your employer stubbornly refuses to pay to your bank account, exercise it.

By law not in Norway, salary has to be deposited to a banking account by the employer, unless it 's impossible or highly inconvenient [0]. And to combat fraud it is basically impossible for the banks to deny you a basic account (how else could the tax authorities reasonably audit who gets paid what), so be ready for the employer taking you to court to make you open one (accounts are free to you as a consumer after all) so that they don't have to deal with salary amounts of cash, and the courts siding with them.

[0]: https://lovdata.no/lov/2005-06-17-62/§14-15

Sounds like your employer decided it was impossible

Norway is not a EUR country, so their situation hasn't anything to do with my original comment that this thread spawned from. Norwegian salaries and taxes are paid in NOK.

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