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Comment by rlanday | Hacker News Reader

The issue here is the people no longer work in Massachusetts. They may not even be setting foot in Massachusetts. My situation is that I used to work in Google’s NYC office but live in New Jersey (and have lived here since pre-COVID) and have set foot in New York maybe like six times since March, never for any work-related purpose, yet New York is still withholding income taxes.

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"yet New York is still withholding income taxes"

That is google. They don't have to withhold that. IF google didn't withhold that state tax -- it would be impossible for NY to figure out how much it is owed. You can ask google to not withhold for NY with a HR meeting.

The withholding is based on Google’s understanding of the law (it’s not like they could just decide to not do it). I can’t ask Google to change their interpretation of the law since I’m not a lawyer.

Sure. And people I know are moving officially remote to NH and will not be going into an MA office except rarely so they will/should no longer be on the hook for MA income taxes.

It often revolves around whether the company has a physical place for you to work. Just because you are not using it may not alter the tax situation.

New York has a rule about “convenience of the employer.” The name is misleading and doesn’t make any sense, but basically if there was no way to do the work in New York (e.g. your company sent you to New Jersey to hook up someone’s internet), it’s not considered New York-sourced income, but otherwise it is.

The issue with the current situation is that in principle I could be doing the work in New York (it doesn’t matter where I do it), but the office is closed and I don’t live in New York. So I have strong reasons for not doing my work in New York, but in principle I could be doing it there.

I guess there’s a further clause that you have to spend at least one day out of the year in New York to be taxed there, which unfortunately I have done (despite no longer traveling there for any work-related purpose).

Can't Google switch your status to remote? Or won't they? I think that's how things work where I am. (It doesn't really matter in my case as I live in the same state as my officially assigned office where I set foot in maybe a half dozen times in the past year.)

They could, but they won’t. I think one reason is that management is trying to maximally maintain the pretense that we’re all going to return to the office in July (I don’t see how we can make everyone go back after ~15 months without losing a bunch of employees) to keep their options open. Another is that I think Google doesn’t want to pick a fight with a state government we have thousands of employees in, or get bad press for looking like we’re trying to get out of paying taxes; in both cases, it’s better for the company for employees to take independent action (e.g. asking New York for the money back when we file our returns and making the state government deal with us all individually if it really wants to play this game).

Good luck though I suspect it will be challenging to the degree that your employer says that you are working out of a given office to claim otherwise.

It is public information though that the US offices are closed and we don’t have to be back until July (it’s called “voluntary WFH” but they won’t even let us back in to pick up stuff we left on our desks).

I assume that so long as you're officially working out of an office in a location and the company won't change your payroll status, that's where you're working out of as far as taxing authorities are concerned no matter what the "public information" is. I'm guessing it's not even especially legit but very few entities are pushing on it at this point--except in cases like this one where there's a big advantage to employees pushing to switch their work location.

When California came after me for Hawaii income, all I had to do was send them a copy of my Hawaii returns. Someone who lives in NJ will file taxes there anyway.

My concern is that I will file the New Jersey return and pay taxes on the money I earned while working and living there, and file the New York return and ask for my money back since I don’t live or work there, and if New York denies the refund, I’ll be paying taxes in both states.

It’s unclear at this point whether New Jersey will let New York claim all this taxable income or whether New Jersey will try to claim it for itself (it needs the money too). The tax rates are pretty similar in both states but my preference would be for the money to go to the state I actually live in.

You need to pay NY taxes, you worked for NY office. If you don't want to pay NY taxes then ask Google to change your office location to NJ.

And NY will demand their taxes 100%.

Worked, past tense. I’m perfectly happy paying New York taxes on the income I earned while actually working out of the New York office.

Yes, that totally makes sense. I had to wait quite a while for that California refund to arrive... It seems there would be enough people in your situation that your state might do something official on your behalf? The attorney general could certainly file suit for the amount that NY state owes NJ's citizens.

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