To WFH while on holiday abroad so I don’t use up holiday entitlement?

[RaspberryFarfait]

We have already have a big holiday booked this year and DH also wants to spend a month in his home country with his parents during the summer holidays.

He doesn’t WFH, so will use all holiday entitlement, but I do. Colleague is also on leave for some of that time so I wouldn’t normally be able to be off as need to cover.

WIBU to not book holiday, travel over there and work as normal, without telling work. I only work part time and it’s certainly doable.

Only problem is will I be able to log in remotely from abroad? Has anyone done this?

Don’t want to ask work yet as they’ll cotton on!

My contract does not mention remote working at all. Which is odd as it was from last year and colleagues had already been wfh for almost 2 years. It only mentions ‘based at’.

There is a double tax treaty but the amount specified as taxable earnings is over what I earn in a year, let alone a month! How would that work @Festivecheer26 if you don’t mind me asking?

Exactly this. It’s not tax implications for the employee, it’s for the employer. Employees don’t pay any attention to the various obligations employers have, including things like payroll tax, but the employer will do and they need to assess the risks.

This kind of ‘but why can’t I work from anywhere’ kept us all very busy during the pandemic as it turned out people had scattered all over the place without any approvals.

I still don't understand how anything mentioned is at all relevant.

The UK has many tax treaty's with USA (largely complicated), Singapore, India, Australia, Pakistan etc.
Eg
"Claiming Double Taxation Relief for companies and other concerns".

I simply don't see how OP's situation is relevant to @Festivecheer26 's statement : "company may suffer tax consequences under the relevant tax treaty". What tax consequences might OP's company suffer? For her 1 month?

I still don't see how any of the OP's situation is at all relevant.
How would OP's situation affect corporation tax? The answer is, it wouldn't.

A company may need tax advice if a number of their employees are travelling or working abroad for a period of time.

It doesn't apply for most normal people going for a weeks holiday to Benidorm/Malaga and needing to respond to an email.

Spanish

The Spanish Tax treaty is in respect of residency. Living in the UK or Spain for "183 days per year".
Which is exactly what I claimed right at the start. I asked anyone to link anything that had more info than the HMRC re working abroad, or residency. It needs to be for a large proportion of the tax year.
OP's 1 month does NOT count.
Even @Howmuchwood said in her second point : "1 month often fine".

So none of anything mentioned applies.

Clearly I've over invested in this thread. But I hate it, it gets my goat, when people come on sprouting false and factually incorrect technical and legal terms.

Many posters posted about tax implications. But it's nonsense. It doesn't apply to OP's situation.

Why can't I do this boss? Um, um you can't. Why? I don't know. Er maybe there are ...,. Tax implications.....
(Er. No. There aren't. They don't apply)

"But it’s breaking all sorts of regulations."

@tcjotm

What regulations is it breaking?

@tcjotm

Employers "payroll tax". Really?
Which payroll tax is that then? That applies to OP's situation.

I hate it when people try to intimidate general folk, bedazzling them with technical terms. This is so complicated, you stupid folk couldn't possibly understand.

Really?

@oblomov22 I'm not trying to intimidate anyone, indeed my job is to make complex tax law easy.to understand.

Without knowing the specifics of which country OP is a citizen of and will be travelling to, and what OPs role is, then its hard to say for sure whether its an issue.

There are various red flags with people working outside their home country which means a lot of companies don't want the risk and their policy is noone can work from abroad. If the company breaches local overseas law without knowing (e.g. person goes to Spain, then in theory their employing company has to follow Spanish social security and labour laws) they can have tax and other regulatory problems. One month could be OK in some countries but it depends on the type of worl being done. Anything customer facing is risker for tax than a back office role. Someone who works in sales might create tax problems for the company they work for from day 1.

Other companies have risk assessed that their employees can work for short periods abroad buy they have put in place mitigations to protect the company such as putting the employees that are mobile onto a separate payroll in a different employing company, or setting up branches of their company in lots of overseas countries.

Whatever anyone says on this thread it is essential that OP gets permission from her employer to work remotely while on holiday. The biggest risk to OP personally is the right to work /visa issue. The biggest risk to her employer is that she has an accident while travelling and they can't cover their costs under their UK insurance policies. The tax is a longer term issue in most cases but for some roles will be an issue from day 1 of working overseas.

@Howmuchwood

I wasn't referring to you re intimidation. You are the tax expert. I was referring to all the posters who flippantly kept saying 'the tax implications'.

Let's be honest, none of which applies to OP.

But like I said "short periods abroad "
and "separate payroll" don't apply to most people, not OP's month, nor a week in the Costa del sol.

I’m not trying to intimidate anyone. OP asked for advice. She hasn’t given her jurisdiction and in mine, payroll tax and other obligations (like workers comp as I mentioned in my earlier post) are issues employers have to consider before approving things like that. These are not things the average person would know which is why I mentioned it as something her employer might need to consider. I don’t want her going off without permission and then getting into trouble later. She would be if she worked for my employer, which is why I shared the considerations we’d have with her as something to think about.

How that is intimidation I don’t know?! I’m just trying to be helpful. Other people were saying ‘tax implications’ implying those are on the OP. Where I am, they are concerns for the employer and being risk adverse, they generally refuse any requests to work outside of the country. I wouldn’t expect people to know that which is why in my job if someone asks a question like the OP’s, I give this advice - get it approved first because there are considerations you haven’t thought about. I know enough to know I don’t know enough, which is why I want her to get it approved so she doesn’t accidentally ruin her trip by getting in trouble from her employer.

I was agreeing with the post that used that sentence you quoted, that wasn’t my wording, But our risk assessments would consider if we were risking breaking regulations such as:

-taxes/social security contributions to be paid by any employer with someone working in that country
-Insurance contributions to be paid by employers on behalf of staff working in that country
-employment laws vary considerably - we wouldn’t know what they were and what we had to follow. Will we be in breech by accident? Does the employee gain any additional rights we don’t know about?
-Workers compensation. What happens if they are injured, how will that be covered?

Approved business travel addresses these issues. Someone spending a month abroad without their employers knowledge, leaves a lot unaddressed. Probably fine but I don’t want OP to face a misconduct accusation. I’m giving her reasons she hadn’t considered to encourage her to speak to her boss first.That ok with you?

@Oblomov22 I guess you’d prefer “sounds great hun, you enjoy your trip”.

I do hope @RaspberryFarfait has a great trip but I’d like it better if she doesn’t get any grief afterwards too.

@Oblomov22

As I have already said, the employing company might have to file a corporation tax return and pay corporation tax in the jurisdiction the OP travels to. These are the potential corporation tax consequences of an employee of a UK tax resident company working from another jurisdiction.

As a chartered tax advisor of 15 years specialising in corporate tax I can tell you that actually your statement “How would OP's situation affect corporation tax? The answer is, it wouldn't.” is factually incorrect. As @Howmuchwood says, there isn’t enough information in the OP to conclude one way or the other. As I said in my original post, the risk of a single trip is low but there can be circumstances in which this is enough to mean the company the employee works for has to file a tax return overseas. I’ve seen this in practice so can assure you that it does happen.

I’m not trying to scaremonger or intimidate anyone, the only reason I posted was because you started rebuffing the mention of tax implications so strongly and you aren’t correct. Maybe you mean that there won’t be any tax implications in a situation like OP’s because local tax authorities will have no way of finding out?

The OP came on to ask essentially whether she needed to ask her boss before working remotely overseas and the short answer is yes. Part of the explanation for this answer is that her employer will need to consider any potential corporation tax risks of her proposed arrangement - there may well not be any, but they need to work through the analysis to conclude.

In defence of the people who have replied with “there might be tax implications” - this is what they’ll understand from their own employers. Lots of employers had to address the issue of employees requesting to work abroad / being found to be logging on from other jurisdictions during covid and so had to either remind their staff of their employment contract terms or communicate new policies around remote working and did so in layman’s terms rather than issuing detailed tax technical arguments explaining why. These people aren’t spouting “nonsense” as you say, they are sharing their experiences.

I’d be interested to know why you think so resolutely that there are absolutely no potential tax implications of a situation like OP’s?

@RaspberryFarfait I’m sorry but without seeing the wording I’m not sure how it would apply. Is it suggesting that any amounts earned over a certain threshold would mean you have to pay some income tax?

OP, don’t know where you’re going but DH’s company doesn’t allow working from abroad anymore since Brexit. Something to do with taxes, legal stuff. They can see where you’re logging in from and you may be blocked from accessing files etc. Talk to your employer but they may well say no!

I would speak to your employer before doing it. Mine wouldn't mind, if possible. She plans on doing it at some point, but we do have an office in the country she wants to go to.

I really like my job though so wouldn't risk loosing it. They will hopefully be able to accommodate you. It sounds like it would be great! My job time/ days would really lend itself to something like that too.

My partner works in cyber. You'd definitely need to check. I think a lot of employers are probably saying remote working overseas is fine, without fully knowing the rules. Data protection and GDPR is a big one. If you are dealing with people's personal data, there are legitimate security risks, pinging data between countries. You just can't risk it. I'm amazed at how many people (and I'd be surprised if NHS and civil servants are actually allowed if they really looked into it) are allowed to do this. Tax implications aside!

I know this keeps drifting back to the UK employers position and them needing to give permission seems to be regarded as the be all and end all....

May be yet another nudge is required about the other major issue that's still in play here - the seemingly oft ignored "right to work"....

Most folks carry laptops around the world these days and officials generally don't raise eyebrows at those being carried. However there was a comment some time ago upthread about putting monitors in the car, luggage on the roof....If that is even close to what is being planned then if Border/customs get involved at any point (either cross channel or at A N other border) the conversation could get very interesting, especially if the OP is supposedly travelling for leisure purposes but carrying an IT suite in the car.....

Someone on my team tried this recently, when I had said she couldn't do it and should take holiday. I got a call from IT to ask why she was in [country] and using a vpn to conceal her location!! If your employer has sophisticated IT security in place and there is a requirement to let them know, you likely won't get away with it. We had to fire her unfortunately as it was a significant breach of policy, and more so trust.

100% this.

I work for the NHS and we were told working abroad was a definite no. They couldn't vouch for the security of our systems and given that we access a lot of confidential information it was a non-starter.

You must tell them
There could be tax implications and there will be security ones
Its highly unlikely your part time job will have clearance to use international web ways or numbers.
So you must ask
And if they say No then accept that.

If you use a vpn to login remotely, it's probably a fairly security conscious company, so they'll likely have other measures in place that will notice instantly that you're logging in from another country, even when you use the companies vpn. It does for ours. We then ask a team if they gave permission for that. If they didn't, we disable the account instantly and remove vpn access. So you'd likely lose access if you're breaching policy and be in major trouble, not just with your boss. As you've only been there a short time and need money to live I assume, I wouldn't chance it as you may end up fired.

Definitely ask your boss. It's much safer. You might be allowed, or can get permission to do it, you never know. Worth a shot to have a holiday abroad.

Excellent post. And you are right I have no clue what the “tax implications” are I just know that people got disciplined during lockdown for working abroad without permission and all the comms around this topic stated that as being the reason

Loads of people at my company have done this. Ranging from 2wks to 6mo+

Would definitely check with your employer, but it's definitely not out of the question

It’s interesting isn’t it. Ours has been fine pre covid - I mean usually when they need me (!) to dial into a call or check through something urgently. Now everyone is more
or less WFH they’ve said we cannot work abroad due to tax purposes. I suspect it’s more to stop us working on holiday/lack of trust. They’ve said “tax purposes”.

Speak to your work. If anything hapoened to their laptop etc, it could be a sackable case (depending on info etc).
If you are caught it is a disciplinary case.

I can log in from anywhere and I have done this myself . I don’t see a issue , just make sure you have reliable internet access .
I used to spend over a month with my parents abroad. Even though I had to work the having a pool and the beachfront made it so much easier .In fact just discussing jobs with DP we came to the conclusion he will be trying to find a job that is remote , as we have family in 2 different countries and swindling a few months abroad at a time might work for us really well . As I work remotely I can work anywhere