Imagine for a second that the pandemic is over. Global travel has resumed, Covid hot-spots are a thing of the past and companies are actually keeping a promise some have been making lately: to allow remote work from anywhere in the world, at least for a few months a year.
Then envision a Londoner, a New Yorker and a Hong Konger walking into a bar. Let’s say it’s in Rio de Janeiro. They all make the same salary—$100,000—and have been allowed to work remotely from Brazil for two months.
Once they’ve put down their caipirinhas and returned home from their stints abroad, who will owe the most in taxes?
That’s the thorny question staff and their employers are trying to determine as they plot out their post-pandemic work arrangements. Despite continued uncertainty and uneven hiring, the job market is tightening in many countries, and firms—particularly startups—are eager to attract new talent with remote-work options.
According to Robert Salter of tax and advisory firm Blick Rothenberg, our remote worker from New York could face the highest bill, while the Londoner could have nothing extra to pay. However, this assumes all three fill out their Brazilian taxes on time in accordance with regulations and—perhaps most importantly to avoid costly mistakes—in Portuguese.
And he warns of a worst-case scenario for this new generation of jet-setters: being required to file multiple tax forms in different countries while also losing any benefits from tax treaties between jurisdictions.
“It could be a disaster,” he says. “You could have to do four or five tax returns.”
Work As Perk
Ten years ago, the likes of Uber, Facebook and Instagram differentiated themselves from Wall Street firms by offering free lunches, kooky office setups and a casual dress code.
Now, companies from London to New York and Toronto to Berlin are formalizing and even extending their Covid-era flexible-work options, often with liberal limits on where employees can commute from and how long they can do it for.
“The remote job is the new ping-pong table,” says Andrea Miotto, a 29-year-old iOS developer who works at Cambridge, U.K.-based startup Droplet.
A native of Venice, Italy, Miotto was hired by Droplet last year. Since then he has worked all across his native country, from Puglia to the Alps. Over the past few months, he’s been hopping across Spain’s balmy Canary Islands, with stints on Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Gran Canaria and Tenerife.
“This is more than a gimmick,” says Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who has studied work-from-home trends. “This is a pretty valuable lifestyle offering that may be the only way you can hire good people.”
Revolut, one of Europe’s most valuable startups, earlier this year announced that its 2,000-odd staff would be allowed to work abroad for up to two months a year.
Chiara Baroni, a communications manager at Revolut who is usually based in Berlin, said she took advantage of the policy change to work from the island of Tenerife this spring. (There, incidentally, she met Miotto and many other startup workers.)