4 ms·
Most US companies will hire remote "inside the USA" but not outside the USA due to potential foreign tax and legal liabilities. While the USA might be good for
by gardnr 4y ago
Most US companies will hire remote "inside the USA" but not outside the USA due to potential foreign tax and legal liabilities. While the USA might be good for the reasons you listed, hiring remote full-time employees can be a legal minefield. If every employee is a contractor then that introduces its own legal issues in the USA.
- rozenmd 4y agoThey could always use an employer of record for the foreign employees like remote.com
- mikeryan 4y agoThere’s a company called Deel (I’m a customer) that can take a lot of the pain out of this including being the employer of record in many countries. There are others as well. http://letsdeel.com http://letsdeel.com
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Most US companies will hire remote "inside the USA" but not outside the USA due to potential foreign tax and legal liabilities. That’s not a unique feature of the USA. It doesn’t matter what country you’re incorporated in. You’re still obligated to follow the local laws and tax codes of any foreign country you hire in. Technically some companies (shady crypto plays especially) will try to incorporate in a weird location and then flaunt laws and pay people “under the table”, but they’re just breaking those laws, not escaping them.
- jpmoral 4y agoSorry, 'flout', not 'flaunt'.
- sdrinf 4y agoGiven the number of founders I've seen running into this problem, I think it's worth calling it explicitely out: the problem with US incorporation as a foreign person isn't just your local tax code, but: US LLCs/partnerships (a very common structure for incorporating) require witholding (ie taxes) for foreign holders 30% (which is one of the highest rates) (keywords for googling: Federal Withholding Tax for Foreign Nationals ). You can write this off from your local taxes, but generally you'll still end up paying more, than if incorporated locally. This means, that eg as a pass-through partnership incorporated as an llc, getting money out from the company will incur a 30% tax plus state plus local taxes. There's additionally a problem (more for small corps), that the paperwork on the above will involve at least 2 accontants -one from US, one locally, meaning non-trivial startup costs. None of this is to disencourage you to go with US; just do so with open eyes, and it's worth sitting down with an accountant in potential target country _before_ incorporation.
- Scoundreller 4y ago30% if there’s no tax treaty. Treaties trump laws (if ratified). So you’ll have to read through each treaty with your employees’ country to see what needs to be withheld. So for OP, for operational simplificity, a domicile with the least number of treaties would be best (but possibly horrendous for tax efficiency).
- GeneralMayhem 4y ago> witholding (ie taxes) The witholding rate is not the tax rate... if your actual tax burden is less than 30%, you file a tax return in April and Uncle Sam writes you a check for the difference. There's a time-value-of-money cost, but not an actual cost.
- melony 4y agoThe term you are looking for is PEO. See my old comment for some service options https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254615