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Comment by a012 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never worked in 2 countries but there are many countries that have DTA (https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/internationa...) so theoretically you only pay taxes to one country at a time, wouldn’t it be simpler?

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If you are a US citizen, US taxes you on your worldwide income, so you have to file regardless of where you live. And filing in the US is the actual burden, not the taxes themselves — inscrutable tax law and byzantine forms mean that you can't file yourself (you pay tax-filing companies to do that for you) and your tax returns easily reach hundreds of pages.

US screws its expats in a big way.

The club of countries that do this includes: United States, Eritrea and Myanmar.

The thing is, only the US can realistically know your worldwide income. And only due to its banking cronies it intimidates into submission worldwide.

I still have to submit the paperwork that says which country my income was earned in, which is basically the standard tax paperwork from country A plus an extra form or two. (And in years when I went to country A on business trips, it's non-trivial. Simple enough, but not as trivial as years when I was in country B the whole time). It's not extremely burdensome, but it's still one more piece of paperwork to keep track of than the tax paperwork that people who have never left country A have to deal with.

This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.

Don't get double-taxed on income, specifically. You may still get double-taxed on investments, property, wealth, etc depending on which pair of countries

When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later).

P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.

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