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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity. Do tax authorities tap into your travel/passport activities to determine where you are spending your time? Could you just have a local address listed as your residence?

I know maybe bordering a slippery slope towards tax fraud or something, but theoretically, I'm curious how clued in the tax authorities are to where you actually reside vs where you say you reside.

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When I was very young, I did a four month internship with the Canada Revenue Agency. I learned three things:

1.) Don’t even think about screwing with tax authorities.

2.) See #1.

3.) See #1.

Same goes for Germany if you're not wealthy. You can do lots of things, but don't try to screw with the tax office.

I once met someone who "lived" in Monaco, and offered me use of his apartment so long as I bought groceries and ate in restaurants using his credit card.

This was obviously to prove he lived there for tax evasion.

Here in the Netherlands the tax authorities go a long way. They have demanded data from parking apps and even from a museum subscription. Judges have ruled that they are entitled to do so and use this information in court.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...

Apparently the UK can generate a report of where I travelled with my passport, so they can get that data but the systems are probably your typical government mess and there may be way to temporarily escape those checks.

I think using a national identity card to travel would bypass those checks (apparently the trips where I used my national identity cards didn't appear) - maybe driving instead of flying could help as well but I haven't tried.

I think the more time passes the harder it will get to evade that - and problems are likely to be compounded by countries running out of pensions money and the covid economic crisis - so I'd recommend just moving to a country that treat you fairly from a taxation perspective instead of trying to break the rules of a country which treats you unfairly.

Most countries participate in the Common Reporting Standard and share residence and tax information with all other participating countries. Strangely, the USA don't participate at the moment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Reporting_Standard

They don't need to tap into your travel/passport activities, just your bank accounts.

> Since 2011, the EU has had a system for exchanging tax and financial accounts information between Member States. Tax authorities in the EU have also agreed to cooperate more closely to tax their taxpayers correctly and combat tax fraud and tax evasion.

Usually you want to do it the other way round and be "overseas" from the big western country with the normal tax rate while you pretend to be resident in the Cayman Islands.

At the individual state tax level (and for payroll tax) it can be a consideration.

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