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Comment by rlanday | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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.

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