Comment by photomatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photomatt | Hacker News Reader

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Just because someone is on a different kind of contract (say a monthly retainer paid by wire, versus employee of US company paid with direct deposit) doesn't mean you need to treat them differently. Every "Automattician" at Automattic is viewed the same regardless of how their employment contract happens to work, and as you scale larger you can set up subsidiaries overseas to directly employ people. (We look at this once we have about 5 people in a given country.)

Also remote work doesn't mean overseas, there is amazing talent all over the USA too that doesn't happen to live in the SF area.

I really liked this sentence: "The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US."

There are about 7 million people in the Bay area, 322M in the US total, so let's say 98% of the great people in the US are born outside of Bay area. There are no visa issues moving between cities or states in the US, but many many other barriers that have nothing to do with visas.

How are you handling the tax implications of foreign workers? Are you doing something to withhold FICA/FUTA? I'm doing some research and I don't see the exception that says that workers that would otherwise be classified as full-time employees can instead be 1099 contractors simply because they're foreign; on the contrary, the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social security numbers.

I'm not a lawyer, but I am an employer, and it is not clear to me that the "1099 remote worker" strategy is as clean a solution to the immigration problem as it's being made out to be.

I wonder if the tax situation is any easier if you're dealing with US companies & employees who are citizens, but living elsewhere. At least the SSN number would be already dealt with, but there would still be tax implications that would be affected by any tax treaty between the US and the other country.

> the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social security numbers

But you cannot issue Social Security Number (SSN) for foreigner without going through immigration process.

I think the same immigration process that would block employers from issuing SSN would also block any foreign contractor from winning "I was de-facto employee" case in court.

IANAL

Exactly.

There is a way to get something like a SSN as a foreigner who isn't eligible for immigration. It's called a Taxpayer Identification Number and it does in some way allow you to file and pay american taxes as someone who is not American or in the immigration pipeline, afaik. I have not had or had to use one, though, so I am unclear on the specifics.

I have a relative who snowbirds in the US on the max visitor visa from Canada and she has all sorts of problems dealing with even basic things like cable companies who want a SSN to do tech support for some reason.

I have done about half my career as a 1099 or equivalent. There is no question that those are treated differently.

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