Hey folks, I have a day job at a public elementary school and an evening gig translating. I didn’t expect the translation to take off so quickly but it’s going to push me into the next tax bracket… My taxes are normally dealt with by my school… What’s the best course of action?
First thing you should do is read up on how tax brackets work. You will not suddenly pay more tax on teaching income.
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Sorry for not explaining clearly. I understand how tax brackets work, thank you. My question is about how and to whom do I declare my self employed side income? Would people recommend using an accountant?
Do you issue invoices for the translation work?
Is it in Taiwan or overseas?
if it is from overseas and under 1 million NTD you might not have to declare it at all.
if teaching and translating are your only sources of income, you can just fill your own taxes (or use the help of the tax buro people) without the use of an accountant.
An accountant is worth it if you have multiple income streams or you are a company (and not an individual).
More than tax questions, consider your legal questions. People who work in the public sector here can’t legally take second jobs. That’s not to say they don’t, as they absolutely do, but it’s not legal. Every time I did so much as give as speech at the local university there were 500 forms that needed to be filled out to make sure it was understood that I was only doing this one favor for the sake of academia and wasn’t going to make a side hustle out of it, etc. As far as I know, all FET contracts also make it explicit that even volunteering needed approval from the MOE.
Why on earth would you allow that!? Go and do the declaration yourself every year.
Yeah I just re-read that paragraph in my contract because I didn’t realize that it stated ‘approval of party A and the local government’ because my school has already green lighted my translating… I will speak with the school accountant and see what she says.
It’s different in the public sector to Buxibans from what little I’ve seen. My taxes are very straightforward and kept within the 5% bracket…
Have not worked in either sector so I don’t know if it’s different or not however I’m not aware of different tax rules applying.
Always do them yourself or at the very least audit what was done for you. My first 3 years here my company took care of the filing and my tax was low however I later discovered it should have been zero the first year and almost zero the next 2, luckily I was able to re-do and get a decent refund.
With an employer sponsored ARC I can understand how this could happen. But, yes, the OP needs to be filing their own taxes in future.
Given the current situation I would self-declare the translation work.
This isn’t correct (from the tax office’s point of view) for work physically conducted in Taiwan. That doesn’t count as overseas income. Many threads on here about this.
I’m about to go out so can’t be bothered typing out a detailed answer, but you should do a search on here for “gaofei”, “9B”, “freelance”, stuff like that. Depending on the specifics of the situation, it’s possible that the translation income might be considered 9B income, which is untaxed for the first NT$180k per year. (There are previous threads on the scope of this category, including at least one by me, but it still seems a bit of a gray area as far as I’m concerned.)
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thanks for clarifying, i didnt know that.
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Just to be clear though, for a Taiwanese employer I believe they code the income when it’s paid out, assuming they’re declaring it at all.
If it’s something you’re doing off the books and there’s no record of it, I don’t know how far you’d get trying to self-declare it as 9B income for an employer inside Taiwan. I’ve only done it for income paid overseas.