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?
Mate you are playing with fire. Do not stay more than 4 months.
Developed countries track the shit out of everyone. They know you are there.
The UK definitely knows how long you are out of the country. All airlines provide data to the Home Office for check-ins of people leaving the UK, and when you re-enter the UK your passport gets scanned. Doesn’t matter if you’re living here “on paper”, the UK government at least knows that you’re not. If you have pre-settled status, you are affecting your eligibility for settled status by being away fir prolonged periods and breaking continuous residence.
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
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/passenger-name-record-data/passenger-name-record-data
You are so niave. The UK government itself tells you that it collects this data, see link above. Do you seriously think that sophisticated first world countries don’t monitor their citizens in just the same way as China does? The only difference is that they tend to be more transparent about it (sometimes) and they don’t use the data to impinge quite so much on people’s liberties.
As another commentator said, you are playing with fire, being dishonest with both the UK government and the Hungarian one, and your employer. I hope one day your entitlement catches up with you.