[sgjohnson]

It goes even deeper than that. There’s also the question on where is the money being made.

Say a hypothetical scenario, I’m self-employed contractor working through a corporation in, say, Panama, and I spend some 120 days a year in Singapore.

Would Singapore even subject me to any taxes?

But yes, ultimately one can be a digital nomad, not be a tax resident anywhere, and not be subject to any income or corporate taxes anywhere. You just have to be very particular about the countries you pick.

[refurb]

Yes they would tax you because the work was done in Singapore.

Would they know? Probably not.

[sgjohnson]

But it’s not you earning any money, it’s an entity in Panama.

Just outlining the complexity of this.

[yardstick]

You’d still have to pay the corporate tax rate in Panama I assume?

How would you eventually obtain beneficial use of that money? Ie how and when would it reach your personal bank account? If it won’t, how do you plan to use the money for your own gain? I assume (haven’t done any research) that Panama wouldn’t let you treat things like paying for Netflix, movie tickets, supermarket shops, clothes shops, etc as business expenses?

At some point you’d need to transfer it from Panama to yourself and at that point it would be taxable (capital gains or income tax depending on how you transfer). If you time things right you could be resident in a country without income tax eg UAE. But you would have still paid Panama corporation tax I believe.

[sgjohnson]

Panama doesn’t tax income on foreign gains, so the corpo tax there would be 0%.

[refurb]

That’s not how Singapore defines “Singapore earned income”.

They define it by “where the work was completed” not “where income come from” or “country where you were hired”.

Many countries do it that way.

Edit: I misread. Well if your Corp doesn’t pay you I see the point, but you’re also the sole owner?

[LunaSea]

That list of countries is usually pretty thin if you also remove countries which forbid you of working while on a tourist visa.

[sgjohnson]

Most countries actually don’t care about you working on a tourist visa, as long as it’s incidental to the travel and the work is online.

The US is the exception here, not the norm.

[LunaSea]

> The US is the exception here, not the norm.

That is incorrect. This is actually the norm in most countries in the world.

> Most countries actually don’t care about you working on a tourist visa, as long as it’s incidental to the travel

But it's not

> and the work is online.

The work being online just makes it better hidden and thus a more difficult fraud to detect but it has no incidence on the legality of the work.

[ghaff]

This comes up periodically.

Generally speaking, events, meetings, etc. are fine in many countries with just a basic visitor's visa. (US, it needs to be a B-1 Business visa.)

However, as you point out, remote online work is hard to police. That said, you shouldn't say that remote work is the reason for your visit. And you should be somewhat discrete--e.g. not renting a co-working space.