I’m not allowed to work from abroad for more than 10 days/ year for ‘tax’ reasons. Is that a real reason companies want to restrain work locations?
I want to work from France for the summer. I have all the set up there to perform as per usual.
Thanks
They can track you even without the company VPN. They may have other endpoint management software installed that can see what wifi networks you are near and do geolocation on the wifi BSIDs. There are other ways too. Don’t rely on your own VPN service to obfuscate your location.
The taxes could be a real thing depending on your company and it’s headquarters although 10 days seems short. 3 months is the rule of thumb for US employees traveling abroad. I would try to get approval for a longer stay and possibly use family as an excuse if you can.
The best solution is a quality home router or mobile/travel router that supports both WireGuard and has an internet kill switch option. Then connect that router with an always on full tunnel to your home or some other location you/family control (avoid the paid ones because the ips can be traced back) and this way your entire home network in France looks like all the traffic is coming from your us address
Edit: DM me if you want a more detailed setup info. I travel a lot both within the us and abroad. I have a glinet travel router setup like above and none of IT companies I have worked for during my travels could tell.
Edit2: Thanks whoever you are for my first gold!
Edit3: here is a link to the rough guide I put together. If anyone has questions or gets stuck reach out. Also I will improve the guide when I have some more time but it should get you there. Digital Nomad VPN Setup | Tech Relay
Taxes can be one reason, it depends on the country and company. For example if someone moves to France to work remotely for four months they now are liable for French taxes and the company is supposed to withhold those etc. and it’s a totally different setup. It can be an accounting nightmare
However the main reason most companies don’t allow it is regulations and compliance. We have customers who due to PCI or HIPAA etc can’t access sensitive systems from other countries which is why we have to keep track of it. Your company will absolutely know where you are logging in from unless you use another vpn
I know someone that was removed from the company due to working overseas. He didn’t know, and lived in New York. At the time COVID was surging and he got scared, so he left the country.
When he connected to company VPN, they immediately blocked him and then he was fired.
A way around it, is to essentially use a VPN in the US to connect, but they may block those too and of course, you are technically breaking company policies and etc. You are also putting them at risk.
Lots of replies related to the IT side but none (so far) has touched the real issue here.
Companies are not always the bad guys in this context.
There are several risks related to an employee, with a work contract from country A (non expatriate or similar) simply moving to country B and working from there.
a few of those listed below
A) Corporate tax risk (risk for corporate)
An employee working in a 3rd country could establish a Permanent Establishment (PE) as per OECD Model Tax Convention. Trust me, this is a bitch and the most serious issue from an employer perspective. The employee working abroad and generating revenue suddenly might create a corporate tax liability in the country where the work was performed. In worst case, this could even lead to double taxation on those revenues. Lots of details around this - google PE and have fun.
B) Immigration (risk for employee and potentially corporate)
If you want to work in a country, usually you have to have the right paperwork. The responsability lies with the individual performing the work but also with the employers who is often legally responsible for ensuring their employees have the appropriate documents to work and someone with Legal/HR can produce the proof in case of an audit. If you get caught, there might be criminal liability besides fines and deportation of the employee. Furthermore, the company might lose access to future visa sponsorship for this country.
C) Income Tax and Social Security (risk for employee and corporate)
Lots of specific rules & regulations here. There might be withholding requirements for the employer, there might be reporting requirements and all of them connected with days the employee spend in a country and / or has family connections to. Lack of compliance might trigger penalties, audits and other unpleasant interest from authorities.
Social security is as complex and to make it more fun, is following a separate set of rules. Depending on various combinations, both employee and employer might be responsible for social security taxes/contributions in the home country, host country, or both.
D) Employee Rights (risk for corporate)
An employee working in a host country even for a limited period of time will almost always acquire local mandatory employment rights, sometimes from the first day of employment in the country. Most of the times, those rights are acquired automatically and cannot be contracted out or derogated from.
As examples of those you can think of:
- Termination rights (e.g. notice periods and severance pay based on statutory laws)
- vacation allowances (min days, maternity/paternity leaves, working hour caps, etc)
- min pay levels
- health and safety protection rights
Furthermore, to make it more complicated, contractual clauses signed by employee and employer in home country might no longer be enforceable and/or even legal, like post termination non-compete clauses without a monetary payment are mostly void in France, Germany or Italy.
E) Employee Benefit Plans (risk for employee and corporate)
Lets not start discussion on things like LTIs, health care plans, pension and retirement plans, equity plans - all a hot mess of jurisdictions allowing one thing here, prohibiting or enfocring the same thing somewhere else.
F) Data Security (risk for corporate)
You might be working on something, where access to data is geographically restricted - even with you not knowing it. Contractual breaches might be very costly for the employer.
There is probably more and the topic is an endless source of income to many advisory companies. I can only speak from experience, that even with corporate support sometimes you get wound up in global treaties where solutions are costly and take years to solve.
Do I recommend not to do it - definitely go for it. However, on reddit people tend to be very unilaterally against everything corporate and I just wanted to offer a glimpse of reality as of why employers sometimes try to restrict the free movement of employees.
Taxes may be the official reason, but there are also local laws and regulations that might make your work more challenging. For instance, I work for a multi-national software company and due to the GDPR am unable to work for European or British clients if I am vacationing/working remotely in the USA.
While taxes may not be a legitimate reason for France – given that non-residents living in France are only taxed on income from French sources – it may be legitimate for many other countries and so your company (well, their lawyers) simply decided to make a blanket rule for the sake of simplicity.
In short, you’d be taking a big risk working in France all summer.
I’m not allowed to work from abroad for more than 10 days/ year for ‘tax’ reasons. Is that a real reason companies want to restrain work locations?
Yes but more. If a company has an employee working in a location that gives the company a physical presence in that location. It not only opens them up to taxation but it also opens them up to all laws and regulations as well.
This is why remote work using the employee model is likely to fail without major geographic limtations. Even US based companies with employees working from home in other states or cities open themselves to these issues. We haven’t begun to really see this play out yet.
The best solution is to move more and more of the work force into independant contractors but to do that legally they can’t have any control over who you work for or when besides very simple things like due dates.
But anyone working as self employeed or for their own company faces these same issues. Especially in nations like the US with very specific laws designed to govern workers in multiple locations. Think sports teams. The players pay taxes based on just a few days in a city or state and they have to justify the total work days. so it isn’t 1/365th for working a day but rather something like 1/45 for example.
Every company device can and will track you. It’s just a question of how often your company checks, if they check, etc.
Yes, they can. If it’s their VPN, they can see the IP logs (and geolocate it).
I have used at least one commercial VPN product that will explicitly tell you where you’re connecting from (you would get an email saying… “is this you?.. we got a connection from IP# located in X City, X country”)… if the end user gets the email, rest assured the IT admins get it too.
Setup a VPN in your own home and connect through it. That, they wont be able to tell as the connection will come from your home.
Potentially unpopular view but just be honest and follow company policies or quit and find a company where you like the policies.
(More directly responding to your Q: Yes they can track you. Most companies won’t bother. If they have reason to get suspicious and it seems you’ve tried to evade detection then you’ll likely be terminated, which isn’t something you want to show up in a reference check.)
Anything Microsoft is basically a leaky faucet. Most don’t let you work from overseas due to security reasons as well.
Travel router with vpn and kill switch is all you need. Don’t overthink it folks. No one is going to geo locate you with your neighbors wifi signals 
It’s hard to say, this honestly depends on many factors, but depending on the company you’d have to give them a reason to track you. They might have blocked some countries from connecting.
Here’s how I’d do it:
You should get your own vpn in the country where your workplace is and then set your location to France and try to connect to your companies vpn (personal vpn-> company vpn->internet). If it works, I’d do it for a week or so. If nobody approaches you, you should be good to go.
Now, this requires some technical knowledge for you to setup just google ‘vpn tunnel’.
Technically, it is very possible for your company to log your ip while you connect to company vpn and then notify the sysadmim.
From my experience: if you are within eu and would like to work from another eu country it’s not an issue for a couple of days-months. Working from outside EU: your company might block access straight away or notify company it department.
I have been on this sub for quite a while. Common approach is to just go ahead and work remotely, if somebody from hr notices and approaches you, you’d have to go back.
I think in about 5% of user stories here people are actually fired straight after returning. Reasons vary from ‘exploit company it infrastructure to threads by working abroad’ to some ‘tax/ insurance implications’ reasons.
Edit: depending on the companies it department they might flag a vpn tunnel also as some kind of suspicious activity. Those steps above obviously only apply if a remote work option is not mentioned in your contract.
TLDR: Yes, your company can know that. Do they take steps to find out? Not necessarily.
Should you give them a reason to do so? Better not.
Good luck!
They absolutely can. And for various reasons : data privacy, employee and employer tax codes, local government rules regarding employee benefits etc. In my experience, it’s not worth risking it. But to each, their own.
Setup a Synology NAS and install Tailscale configured as an exit node. Ensure you have fast internet and it’s attached to a UPS and you should be fine.
Yes it’s legitimate and yes they will likely find out.
My company allows up to 30 says, with permission. Might be worth asking. But it sounds like your company is not one where you can be a true DN long term.
Yes. Also, they likely will have 100% blocking for you in France. You better get approval before you go. Sorry.
Most answers here, while helpful, assume that OP is using company-provided hardware and/or working for a company with adequate IT resources for/interest in employee monitoring. We don’t know that either is the case.
The real answer is that it depends entirely on 1) whether OP is using a company laptop or his own, 2) the manner in which OP is connecting to his company VPN, and 3) whether or not his company has an IT department with the resources, manpower, and (most importantly) interest in tracking its employees’ work location.