Your living room may become a taxable branch office

Under a guidance note of the kind tax authorities publish without warning on a Thursday, an employee working habitually from a flat in another country could create a taxable presence there for their employer. The consequences would be ordinary and severe: registration, filings, and a long argument between two revenue services about how much of a company's profit is attributable to a sofa.

Employers would not respond by ending remote work. They would respond by measuring it. HR systems would grow a day counter, each employee holding a personal balance of foreign days drawn down like leave but without the pleasant associations. Twenty-eight days would be generous. Nineteen would be typical. Zero would appear in the policy as a temporary position pending clarification. Enforcement would then move to the laptop, which already knows where it is: it would check its location at login and politely decline to open company systems outside an approved jurisdiction. The first version would warn. The second would block. The third would file a ticket.

“We would not be preventing anybody from travelling,” a mobility lead would explain. “Travel remains entirely a private matter. We would be preventing the company from becoming tax resident wherever an employee chooses to open a laptop. We consider that a separate question. Our finance department considers it the only question.”

The edge cases are where the absurdity would live. Border regions where the good coffee is one country over. Parents who live ninety minutes and one jurisdiction away. A conference that counts, a holiday that does not, and an airport that turns out to count for four hours. Compliance teams would publish a decision tree, and the decision tree would have a branch for ferries.

The employee would have their own version of the problem, arriving later and alone. Spend enough days somewhere and a person becomes tax resident there too, with a filing obligation nobody mentioned at onboarding. The company would have a mobility team, external advisers and a decision tree. The worker would have a browser tab, an approaching deadline, and a friend who once did this and says it was fine.

The cost would land on the worker, as mobility costs do. Countries would go on advertising for remote workers with visas designed expressly to attract them, while the tax rules those workers arrive under would remain unchanged and unaligned. The invitation and the permission would be issued by different ministries, and neither would answer for the other.

None of this would require a new law. The rules already exist, written for factories, building sites and sales offices, at a time when the question of where a company was present had an obvious answer. What would change is that they would be applied — carefully, and without any malice at all — to the corner of somebody's living room.