Well are you working when you’re working on some code for a software project that you’re on the team of in your company back home? I’d say yes. You program through the night on a plane from Australia to Taiwan and as soon as you enter Taiwan airspace, are you working illegally in Taiwan?
There’s been a lot of discussion on this in forums in Thailand where there are tribes of digital nomads roaming the guest houses. Government officials are openly on record as saying they give zero fucks about it. I think it’d be a cool thing for Taiwan to promote itself as a home for digital nomads. There’s many co-working spaces and the obligatory hipster cafes springing up already and its a good way to attract talent.
Iirc the statement from a Thai government official a few years ago was that it’s okay to do your work emails on vacation. That’s not the same as giving zero copulations about tribes of nomads, and I think it was before the coup anyway.
Under martial law and no constitution (or do they have another one already?), their discretion is vast, and that works both ways.
I as actually thinking of Australia when I mentioned the “impact on the labor market” thing. I don’t recall the wording, but it was along those lines, i.e. if you’re not taking away anyone’s job, it doesn’t matter where your tourist dollars come from.
If I had your way with words that’s what I would have said.
There are threads on remote work; I’m not sure how helpful they are:
There may be other threads; I’m a little rushed right now.
Nah it was specifically addressing the populations of pygmy nomads in Chiang Mai and Pai. Obviously post-coup all bets are off. You’d have to be pretty draconian to bust someone on holiday for answering a work email.
Hi everyone,
thanks for all the useful suggestions. I found some good answers.
Cheers!
Ferris
In every country in the world, except for maybe Somalia, I guess, the basic deal is that if you (as a resident) earn, you’re supposed to pay taxes.
If you live (the definition of which being where things get kind of wiggly) in Taiwan, the government kindly requests that you surrender a percentage of your earnings to pay the grannies who sweep up the park at dawn, keep gas in the garbage trucks, and bang out Lee Teng Hui’s friggin rent.
Among other items.
You may not like it, but it’s a pretty standard arrangement across the globe.
Granted, we live in a country where weaseling out of paying taxes is pretty much the national pastime.
As has been discussed before, good, bad, or otherwise, the ROC Tax Administration has decided that the best way for them to try and enforce the arrangement is to, quite literally, follow the money.
So they couldn’t really give a monkey’s how much revenue one generates offshore, digitally or otherwise.
They’re perfectly happy to sit drinking Old Man Dirt Tea until the moment that you attempt to reconfigure those earnings into spendable readies, that is, actual living NTzers, whether in actual wads of purple paper or digitary numbers on an accredited bank’s computer.
That’s the moment when they change their blue and white sliders for proper shoes and start noticing you.
So if you have an account back in the US or the BVIs or Honkers, into which your pay is being deposited, you’re laughing. And they don’t care.
Or if your PayPal credit is like DM8.5 mungogingillion, you’re laughing. And they don’t care.
Since, at this point in time, at least, landlords and noodle stand guys don’t accept bitcoins, though, sooner or later you’re going to need the kwan, and that’s where they DO start caring.
Anyone who’s had even a small amount of money deposited from overseas, they know that the banks have to expedite more paperwork to free it up than Hitler generated invading Poland.
1 Like