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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

>Employees who attempt to wiggle around those compensation adjustments will be subject to “severe ramifications,” he said, as the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws.

>Zuckerberg said Facebook will monitor adherence by checking where employees access its VPN.

Do you think facebook employees respond well to these sorts of threats? Do you think I'll get a call from HR when I go visit my parents and log in from their house for a couple of days? I've got an idea, we can fit each of the facebook engineers with an ankle tracker like those guys on parole. Can't be too careful.

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I work at FB, and yeah, I'm not too fussed by this. Lying about where you are working from goes under the "don't be a fucking idiot" category, and I don't have much sympathy for idiots making life harder for their colleagues. Re "threats", location tracking of company equipment is pretty much a necessity to handle regulatory issues w/ geographies under sanctions (want to be an even bigger idiot? lie about where you're working from, and move to crimea!). Beyond that, internal systems also react to your location to do things like change the timezone displayed in UIs, adjust notification preferences, etc. HR having access to that data would be entirely unsurprising - if you're trying to defraud your employer, this is already in your threat model.

I'm not a FB employee but this doesn't faze me either. I would expect to be fired by any employer upon the discovery that I was committing significant tax fraud on my employer's income.

I'm just not used to your boss going straight to "We're going to enumerate all the ways we're going to fail to trust you, we've got no evidence you're going to do anything wrong, but we're still going to treat you like you are"

A few days won't matter. However some states like New York have laws that if you're physically in state and working (remotely or otherwise) for more than 14 days in a year; you owe taxes on that income regardless of 'where' it's earned. And pretty much all companies that have people who travel around keep track of it so the taxes are properly reported and paid.

> [in NY] for more than 14 days in a year; you owe taxes on that income regardless of 'where' it's earned

Does that include overseas visitors? I think that legally we are not supposed to be working (for a company in our home country) while “visiting”, but having tax implications is another level of risk I was unaware of...

Plus, if I answer a work call from my country for 5 minutes, does that count as using up one of the 14 days?

I'm not into the exact details of it. Needless to say I got dinged on it from my own company due to traveling (for the company) into the state and had a chat with HR about it and it was explained out to me what was going on.

My guess is that for certain companies following the letter of the law is more important than others and report as they should. The state of NY may or may not bother coming after any company or individual they can prove had people in the area working in some capacity. In most cases I'm guessing it's not worth the bother but for large companies (like Facebook) it may be. So they want to know where their people are working from because it has tax implications that they may be on the hook for.

That is a help, thanks.

Even if the risk of being “caught” is small, it is still important to understand risks. If one does get in trouble for some other reason, then suddenly one can find the book thrown at them for multiple reasons.

"You've been detected using NordVPN. You've been fired. Have a nice day!" - Push Notification from Facebook @ Home

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