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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

What’s the definition of where one lives? For example what if you wanted the NYC salary and you rented out a bunk bed for $50/month and traveled around the country while working remote?

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?

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> What’s the definition of where one lives?

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.

Whether something is illegal is different from whether it's easy to enforce. It's hard to say how likely they are to enforce this, but you're definitely taking a risk by pretending to live somewhere.

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.

Legality is different than enforcement, but the two aren't totally separate.

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.

>How do so called digital nomads handle it from a tax perspective? Do they maintain a residence for tax purposes?

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.

Wonder if it's meant to be like it is with professional sports, where players on a visiting team often have to pay taxes in the state of the home team.

In US, it is relatively easy to commit fraud. The question is: what happens if you get caught. Is it a slap on your wrist or a catastrophically failure (termination, prison time)

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.

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