About $120K~$150K depending on the host country and their particular income tax scheme. Which is not a crap salary, but it's certainly not over the moon Fortune

About $120K~$150K depending on the host country and their particular income tax scheme. Which is not a crap salary, but it's certainly not over the moon Fortune 500 executive comp either. ($50K is about 1/3 of $150K, which is about what a W2 employee would pay - 1099 folks would pay a bit more) There's supposed to be a deduction applied to income taxes paid to your host country - up to a cap. There are two intersecting curves related to host-country taxes paid and US income taxes owed minus the exempted part, which I'm not going to describe here, but through key-entry error or whatever bureaucratic things that happen in paper-processing-office, it is not uncommon to get a bill on a year for about that amount. IF their response to your filing in a year (say 2012) gets lost in the mail and IF the same thing happens the following year - you can owe $100K (on paper - even though mistaken), and not even know it.