I have a EU passport, working remotely in the UK, have a fully settled status, and for the last 8 months I’ve been in the UK for a total of maybe 5 days.

I still have a UK address which I realistically don’t live in, but I have ability to receive letters in there. I Also have UK phone number and I continue to receive salary to my UK bank account. So on paper I’m a resident of the UK.

I use UK credit card for everything and it works out quite well especially with lower costs of living.

I’m currently in Hungary but I’m not registered here. I don’t think they know I’m here because with EU passport I could just cross the border any time and that it doesn’t look like it’s tracked anywhere. I haven’t seen anyone in Hungary to track my whereabouts, and I usually say that I’m temporarily living here.

I haven’t told my employer, which is a bit risky but so far they haven’t found out. My boss said he wouldn’t care if I worked from abroad sometimes (we had an informal chat about it).

Also from IT perspective I know they won’t know (as a software engineer I’m sure)

I do come to the office once every 2 months, and generally my colleagues think I live in England. There aren’t any emergency office meets, which gives usually me time to plan the flights and hotels etc.

So I have few questions.

Could there be any implications if I do it long term? Could HMRC find out that I’m living abroad? Could they use UK border data to check how often I am in the country? Would they even care if they did find out? After all I’m paying tax to their pocket so why wouldn’t they be happy?

  • Intelligent_Loan_987OPB
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    1 year ago

    Yeah but how do you know that? Does the home office have a massive spreadsheet of 80 million residents and perform a database calculation on each resident of their ins and outs? That sounds like a complex operation from a data engineering perspective. It sounds like something china would do. But in the UK it sounds like a privacy violation. Unless I’m subject to police investigation, I don’t see how this could be carried out without attracting news attention