There’s plenty of virtual office / forwarding address services, but claiming you live at one when you don’t for a pay gain risks (1) fraud against your employer; and (2) tax fraud (if eg in a different city / state / country).
Cities definitely don’t have the resources to track you down and I’m not sure employers especially larger ones have any mechanisms in place to keep track. I’m not advocating for this just surprised it’s not more well known. Though I suspect it’s common and just not talked about much for obvious reasons. Certainly there are also jobs that require you to physically work from a given state as well for example.
How do so called digital nomads handle it from a tax perspective? Do they maintain a residence for tax purposes? Is that any different?
https://www.annuity.org/personal-finance/taxes/residency-req...
Ultimately it comes down laws, regulations and taxes. Company wants to make it easy for itself to deal with that.
What makes it more problematic is that it's not just tax offices that would be interested in finding out. The company you work at may also get in trouble with the tax office as they pay employment taxes too, so they are probably interested in the fact that you're deceiving them. If your manager suspects you're not being truthful and follows up with HR this could easily get you in trouble. As remote work becomes more popular, it becomes more likely that companies will pay attention to this.
Knowing all of that, I'd find it quite hard to justify playing these games. It just seems like asking for trouble, with a pretty good chance of getting it.
For example, it's de facto not illegal to drive 5mph over the speed limit on the highway. No police officer will pull you over for that unless they have some other prior reason. So in that sense, lack of enforcement has made the practice legal.
They probably have a "permanent address" at a friend's house or through some service. And it's probably technically fraud. That said, the US is not really setup for citizens not to have a permanent address in one state--even if just for things like driver's licenses. You can do things by the books for tax purposes but I suspect a lot of people moving around don't.
You can, for example, get employed at 10 companies and then outsource all the work (someone got caught doing it and it was in the news).
If you want to cheat, you can, but you probably should not be discussing it on hacker news.
You can just say plans changed and you moved in the case of an audit. You could tell your employer the same thing. Much harder to dock someone's salary once they've started working.
California FTB very much cares if you are collecting SV salary but are not paying CA taxes by living in LCOL areas. Unless you are a CPA, please do not spread lies.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/publications...