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We had a few colleagues that telecommuted from California in a startup that I worked at 2 years ago. Just for those two employees, the company had to draw up different benefits and employment agreements to satisfy the local California laws.
Fortunately, these costs aren't usually ongoing unless you change both on a regular basis.
Yet another way in which government is trying to thwart efficiencies developed by capitalist activity.
Ludicrous! Imagine an employee living out of state doing work at home, like preparing slides for a presentation. No telecommuting, just doing work at a desk. And that's "doing business"?
What about happening to answer the phone while on vacation? Or perhaps working on a server that's located in another state?
It DOES require us to collect sales tax for a bunch of different states, though. This would be a big deal if we were an ecommerce company... you'll notice that Amazon is fanatic about avoiding telecommuters; they don't want to accidentally get themselves in a position of effectively raising their prices by 8% on the entire state of Texas just to have one remote employee there.
The moral of the story is: don't have employees. Have contractors.
Ludicrous! Imagine an employee living out of state doing work at home, like preparing slides for a presentation. No telecommuting, just doing work at a desk. And that's "doing business"?
"Most of the law of 'doing business' is found in the decisions of courts. Those cases afford no precise measure of the extent of the activities which may be determinative of whether a foreign organization is doing business in New York for purposes of qualification. Each case must be decided on its own facts."
http://www.dos.state.ny.us/cnsl/do_bus.html
[where "foreign" == not organized in New York, not necessarily overseas]
The moral of the story is: don't have employees. Have contractors.
Good luck with that. The IRS has very specific rules for who can be considered an employee and who can be considered a contractor. Attempting to treat people who should be employees as contractors is one of their number one enforcement goals, because contractors don't have withholding and are therefore far less likely to pay their taxes.
I was wondering something similar but for countries. Say that I work for my own company developing iphone apps or something like that. Now I like to travel around so I go to the US and work from there, could it be problematic?
I'd like to hear from people who did this, told the immigrations officer about their plans and were not turned back on the border.