And a number of states are getting much more concerned with collecting any taxes they're owed. Someone was even telling me that their business travel will be audited on an ongoing basis to ensure someone isn't working sufficient days in a different state to require a separate tax filing.
In practice, I could almost certainly work from laptop in an adjacent state (on my own dime) for a bit and no one would care but actively misleading about your address of record is not advised.
This is a good point I forgot to mention. We have to be careful to never let staff from outside of NY enter the state and do any kind of business here or they can hit fairly serious tax issues.
That seems extreme? I know NY is especially stringent but people do attend conferences and the like. I haven't seen a few days here and there being an issue AFAIK. I think at one point the metric was 14 days but don't even see that currently. I'm pretty sure if someone headed to the Javits for a day had to file a NY tax return that would be pretty much the end of Javits conferences.
My wife is a lawyer who works for a firm that is mostly remote most of the time. This worked out well during COVID, because they could easily switch to 100% remote, all the time.
She rarely travels for business, but because the firm has people in many of the states in the US, she ends up filing taxes in something like 37 states, every year. Because the firm has a locus in that state, and she is a partner in the firm, that means she has to file taxes there, even though she has not visited that state this year, and has not done any work for any client in that state this year.
Yes, it’s a pain in the ass. But that’s why we have professional tax accountants to deal with the complexity.
There is nothing I have found in business that matches the complexity of HR and tax accounting.
...and the wiseguys that run things there, er, 'dere, would not be happy...
But kidding aside, I feel that the restriction may be an overreaction. Lawyers and accountants can sometimes overcompensate when it comes to stuff they don't fully understand.
I had a friend that wrote a 99-cent iOS app (I don't think he made enough to cover hosting and licensing fees), and his accountant was a bit "over the top." He insisted that my friend could get into serious tax jeopardy over the App Store stuff, and insisted that he pay about a 50% tax.
Hearing about it was painful. Sounded like the guy needed "help," but I'm told that otherwise, he was an outstanding accountant.
It really depends on the individual, more so than the company. We have one team member who previously lived in NYC, then moved during the pandemic. This has been classified as a "convenience" and requires a continuation of taxes in the state. If they re-enter the state in the new tax year, the state can argue a continuation of this. The point isn't that the state is right, the point is the risk of an audit and overhead of dealing with it is high and we don't want to expose team members to that nightmare.
In practice, I could almost certainly work from laptop in an adjacent state (on my own dime) for a bit and no one would care but actively misleading about your address of record is not advised.