NY’s Telecommuting Tax Penalty
With all the talk of remote work lately due to Coronavirus, stuff like this and other employment stuff to think about.<p>Then if say you had a startup in San Francisco and wanted to hire someone remotely from say Cincinnati. Then you are creating obligations in Ohio for your business too (Same as if you owned a brick and mortar office even if you aren&#x27;t locally there) and then if you don&#x27;t own an office there since they work from home that probably would complicate things too when it comes to paperwork and taxes. So if you wanted to let people be remote from any location, that&#x27;s extra stuff for your HR, Accounting, Legal people to handle if in a larger startup and some large companies even write their own custom software to handle the complexities of dealing with multi-jurisdictions and tracking things, while a small startup probably just pays for a HR SaaS that assumes only a single office... So if you hired just anyone remotely instead of targeting specific cities then that could pile up especially if there&#x27;s only a single employee in a location.<p>Then since some stuff is city by city or county by county since some places require home occupation permits (which depending on the area you need to get signed off by the fire department and your landlord if you rent since they consider you operating a business from your house) and business TPP taxes where you have to pay a property tax on business assets, so if you sent a employee new monitors and a MacBook to their house which they&#x27;d return upon leaving the company as the company retains ownership, so if they lived in an area with this (Seems most county and cities have this in Florida and have to file with both at the same time if they both have it. Since they don&#x27;t have some taxes other states have, this seems like one way they make up for it), wonder if that&#x27;d consider every employees house as being an office for the business then? Seems like the whole remote thing opens up a can of worms unless you only hired people remotely in the same city as your business maybe where you have an office. Then I know some of that stuff is public too...<p>Not sure if people challenge home occupation permits, some seem to apply even if you are just sitting on your computer in your bedroom while some are aimed at clients visiting your house, meetings, etc... Some seem to have a list, so like programming at home without clients visiting or extra vehicles, noise, etc would be exempt while other cities apply it to all regardless. I doubt they&#x27;d know if someone was programming in their bedroom anyways though. Sounds like Portland, OR has a more reasonable one compared to other cities i n a random search. I know some non-profit ended up getting some permit to be a tour guide struck down, so wonder if a similar thing they could fight... Don&#x27;t see how someone dabbling in programming and working remotely should have to pay a $200 a year fee, looks like some random city in California wants that. Probably could argue writing source code is speech! I think that&#x27;s what Apple used to get around backdooring iOS...<p>Seems like remote work kinda reminds me of full time RV or Van life challenges since you have to pretend you live with someone and trust them to handle your mail since most states don&#x27;t allow mail forwarders. Seems like RV people pick South Dakota, Texas and Florida (however it&#x27;s county by county as some counties won&#x27;t allow it) to change their domicile too. Was reading somewhere was from Michigan, decided to sell everything they own to live in a RV and didn&#x27;t want to deal with changing domicile so they just got a mail forwarder in MI and updated their address online but later the Michigan DMV sent them a letter saying the address wasn&#x27;t residential and giving them a short amount of time like 10 days to correct it or be suspended. Then remember some RVer used a parents address in IOWA and got Jury Duty so they called the number while they were across the country in like Texas or Arizona and was told living in a RV wasn&#x27;t an excuse (while Texas and South Dakota will excuse full time RVers if you call the clerk, Polk County, Texas where the city of Livingston is in, is supposed to be very friendly to establish yourself as a full time traveler.<p>Just seems like laws wasn&#x27;t really written considering you could have people working remotely or living mobile traveling full time. I&#x27;d imagine less than maybe 10% of people work remotely or less than maybe a few percent living in a RV or Van. Seems like they assume everyone lives in a house and commutes to a nearby office. Just seems like the gov being so outdated with the times, they are hurting and artificially limiting innovation, but maybe it&#x27;s done on purpose. If people lives in RVs or vans they lose out on property taxes. If they allow people to work remotely from home, businesses purchase less office space so they also lose out on property taxes. So maybe it&#x27;s not worth to encourage remote work for these people.