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Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#41

Post by em-bee »

slgeorge wrote: post #28
relix wrote: post #13

As far as I know, the only way to avoid creating a tax nexus in each country where you have "employees" (or contractors) is to make sure the contractors invoice you. The way this usually works is indeed the contractors have a sole proprietorship or legal entity from which they invoice you. If you just pay them without an invoice but as payroll then congratulations you're now on the hook for all taxes and social secur…

This works if you have a person(s) for a period of time. But, the longer they work for you 100% of the time, and the more team members you have in a jurisdiction the more likely the team members are to be considered employees and that you have established a business in the jurisdiction. At least in the UK the separate company and 'invoice' rule is important, but there are a number of other questions used to determine…

how can a remote country force me to open a local business entity? i am not there, so they can't get me. they can only get my contractors which would hurt them, not me. (the worst is i could loose them, and they'd be out of work)

the remote country would have to have an agreement with my country to be able to force me to change anything.

(the european union counts as one country here, so i am asking about the case where at least one party is outside)

greetings, eMBee.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#44

Post by konschubert »

codegeek wrote: post #39

You have 2 options: 1. Hire them as "freelancer/self employed" and let them invoice your company. They can either invoice as individuals or through their own company if setup. But laws get tricky depending on countries. For example, if you are an employer-based out of the US and the freelancer is NOT a US person (US person has a specific definition) , you need them to fill out something called W8-BEN form but you nee…

That's seems pretty convoluted. Are the any companies that can take care of these things for you?

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#45

Post by skrebbel »

slgeorge wrote: post #27

1. Individual service companies / Sole proprietorship One thing to be aware of is that in many European companies a person who works for you full-time is considered to be an 'employee' even if they come in through an individual service company. In particular if they have no other active 'customers'. The more you treat people as 'employees' the more at risk you are: if you give them holidays, if you monitor their work…

Thanks a lot! This is an extremely insightful comment. I'm confused it isn't higher up the page.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#46

Post by skrebbel »

tixocloud wrote: post #33

Thanks for posting this as I'm anticipating to be going down the same journey as well. I'm surprised that there isn't already some sort of service that handles this although it does sound like quite an administrative entanglement. Off topic: Do you get requests around embedding AI/NLP in your chat program?

> Off topic: Do you get requests around embedding AI/NLP in your chat program?

Occasionally, but not too often. Thing is, relatively few of our customers use TalkJS for customer support - the usual suspects (Intercom, Zendesk, etc) are usually better than TalkJS for those use cases. Turns out most services that need the flexibility that TalkJS offers (eg for user-to-user chat instead of user-to-helpdesk chat) need it for direct communication between real humans.

But there's a number of edge cases, so we do have a few customers who've connected TalkJS to chatbot AIs via our REST API / webhooks.

There are other fields that AI could solve that we get requests about more frequently though. For instance disallowing people to share "real world" contact information such as street addresses (some of our customers are marketplaces who are afraid to lose their transaction markup if customers can easily bypass them). Given how insane street names can be this is an impossible problem, but decent AI could do better at that than any regex can.

Curious why you ask!

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#47

Post by paulcole »

michaelanckaert wrote: post #17

The best way to go about is ask you remote 'employees' to invoice your company. They are independent contractors and are responsible for their own taxes and social security payments. Don't think that being a contractor is hard, in some countries you can just start invoicing without any company creation or registration as long as you declare the income and pay required taxes. The downside is that anyone working as an…

>The best way to go about is ask you remote 'employees' to invoice your company. They are independent contractors and are responsible for their own taxes and social security payments.

This isn't legal in the Us except under specific circumstances. Whether I'm a contractor or an employee isn't my choice – the IRS has a pretty clear distinction between the two.

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#48

Post by konschubert »

konschubert wrote: post #44
codegeek wrote: post #39

You have 2 options: 1. Hire them as "freelancer/self employed" and let them invoice your company. They can either invoice as individuals or through their own company if setup. But laws get tricky depending on countries. For example, if you are an employer-based out of the US and the freelancer is NOT a US person (US person has a specific definition) , you need them to fill out something called W8-BEN form but you nee…

That's seems pretty convoluted. Are the any companies that can take care of these things for you?

Apparently there is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18170086

EDIT: I think the comment is wrong actually, trinet only offers this service for companies and employees in the US.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#49

Post by lovich »

paulcole wrote: post #47
michaelanckaert wrote: post #17

The best way to go about is ask you remote 'employees' to invoice your company. They are independent contractors and are responsible for their own taxes and social security payments. Don't think that being a contractor is hard, in some countries you can just start invoicing without any company creation or registration as long as you declare the income and pay required taxes. The downside is that anyone working as an…

>The best way to go about is ask you remote 'employees' to invoice your company. They are independent contractors and are responsible for their own taxes and social security payments. This isn't legal in the Us except under specific circumstances. Whether I'm a contractor or an employee isn't my choice – the IRS has a pretty clear distinction between the two. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-con…

Just send your employees all their work through an app that has a take it or leave it option on the price you'd pay them with no negotiation. Now they are all magically contractors while still acting like FTEs

Re: Ask HN: How do you pay remote employees in different countries?

#50

Post by paulcole »

lovich wrote: post #49
paulcole wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best way to go about is ask you remote 'employees' to invoice your company. They are independent contractors and are responsible for their own taxes and social security payments. This isn't legal in the Us except under specific circumstances. Whether I'm a contractor or an employee isn't my choice – the IRS has a pretty clear distinction between the two. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-con…

Just send your employees all their work through an app that has a take it or leave it option on the price you'd pay them with no negotiation. Now they are all magically contractors while still acting like FTEs

I like the way you think! Ever considered using that idea to take on the taxi industry?
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