I suspect you haven't had the pleasure of living in multiple EU countries. Schengen is borderless for travel. It is not paperless (or borderless) for living. De

I suspect you haven't had the pleasure of living in multiple EU countries. Schengen is borderless for travel. It is not paperless (or borderless) for living. Depending on where you live, you may have to register with local government. If you have a job somewhere, you'll have to register with tax authorities. You can pretend you're a "digital nomad", but as the saying goes: death & taxes! You'll end up paying your taxes, one way or another. "How can they even know" is the wrong question. "How can you think that you can get away with living places without paying taxes?" is a better question. There is a lot of small scale tax evasion going on, like registering a car in Luxemburgh while living in France. Or buying boatloads of tax free booze somewhere and forgetting to declare it. You can probably get away with that without too much effort. But dodging income tax altogether? Forget it. Property tax? Good luck. If anything, you'll end up paying more because of your ambiguous residency status. There are all kinds of treaties for cross-border workers and all kinds of ways to prevent getting taxed twice. But there aren't many ways to avoid getting taxed.