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?
I’m Hungarian. They’ll never find you
Edit: maybe watch out to not leave a long record of papers such as rental agreements etcy. But I doubt the Hungarian authorities care or even have the capacity to investigate.
This is not tax advice tho. Why not just go around to make sure you don’t stay more than 50% of the year in one country?
If you have friends in Hungary, you could still easily visit them from Bratislava etc
Yeah that’s kind of what I’m doing anyways. I’m not on any papers, and the flat belongs to my girlfriend haha