It grows exponentially the more countries are involved. I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B, and I have to satisfy country B's visa requirements, which involves quite a bit of paperwork. I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. It gets complicated.

But I'm only dealing with the requirements of two countries. The author mentioned five or six countries; I'm glad I'm only dealing with two.

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a012 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve never worked in 2 countries but there are many countries that have DTA (https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/internationa...) so theoretically you only pay taxes to one country at a time, wouldn’t it be simpler?

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jwr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you are a US citizen, US taxes you on your worldwide income, so you have to file regardless of where you live. And filing in the US is the actual burden, not the taxes themselves — inscrutable tax law and byzantine forms mean that you can't file yourself (you pay tax-filing companies to do that for you) and your tax returns easily reach hundreds of pages.

US screws its expats in a big way.

The club of countries that do this includes: United States, Eritrea and Myanmar.

	▲	gear54rus 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is, only the US can realistically know your worldwide income. And only due to its banking cronies it intimidates into submission worldwide.

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rmunn 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I still have to submit the paperwork that says which country my income was earned in, which is basically the standard tax paperwork from country A plus an extra form or two. (And in years when I went to country A on business trips, it's non-trivial. Simple enough, but not as trivial as years when I was in country B the whole time). It's not extremely burdensome, but it's still one more piece of paperwork to keep track of than the tax paperwork that people who have never left country A have to deal with.

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buildfocus 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.

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swiftcoder 2 days ago | parent [-]

Don't get double-taxed on income, specifically. You may still get double-taxed on investments, property, wealth, etc depending on which pair of countries

	▲	rmunn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later). P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.

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cesarb 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B [...] I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork.

Isn't that the case only when country A is the USA? AFAIK, nearly all countries in the world tax only residents, not citizens, so in most cases you'd only have to fill tax paperwork (and pay taxes) for country B.

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tow21 2 days ago | parent [-]

Only if you're only talking about income from work. If you own property in country A which you rent out while you live & work in country B, then you probably still owe tax on that rental income in country A. (but it will depend on the exact wording of the relevant DTA if one exists)

And since you are now filling in two tax returns for different countries, with different tax allowances across rental income and work income which interact in decidedly non-linear fashion, you probably need to make sure both country A and B have no confusion about where your work income was earned.

Having spent the last 8 years obsessively counting days across the UK and Finland (and every other country I have visited) exactly to account for this scenario, I am very sympathetic to attempts to solve this problem space!

	▲	cesarb 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> If you own property in country A [...] But then, that's because you own property in country A, not because you're a citizen of country A! The same would happen if you were a citizen of country B, lived and worked in country B, but bought a house to rent out in country A.