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?
Yeah I have heard that many times that company has to pay the tax in the country where they operate. But in reality how will they know? I don’t think Hungarians with ever know that I’m here as long as I’m not in the system (like having a bank account or being registered anywhere).
Regarding the 186 days to rule, is there anybody out there counting specifically how many days in a year I stay in the country? I don’t think that is in any government’s budget?
You’re official a tax resident of Hungary then. I know plenty of people do it, but be careful the authorities there don’t find out.