So because of COVID, alot of countries are offering these digital nomad visas (Some are short like 3 months at a time, some are long term expanding 2 years) which allow you to work remotely in another country legally without any tax implications, but it's interesting to see how this works on the australian side of things.
However if you run a pty ltd company and you are a sole director, you need to give 2 things as far as addresses.
a) Principle place of work
b) Residential Address of officeholders
And according to asic, you need to be resident of Australia as a sole director. Which means that it looks like you can't ideally stay on these remote working visas for long as you'll have to maintain some form of expensive rent back home as the residential address can't be an overseas address. It looks like you can't even stay overseas for 4 months or so and during that time while you are overseas not have a residential address in Australia even though the remainder of the year, you may have a residential address in Australia. It looks like you have to maintain a residential address 100% of the time throughout the year.
For Principle place of work, you could use a virtual office which you can rent for like $20 a week in which they collect your mail and then can forward it onto wherever they need to. But I don't know if you'd be legally allowed to use a virtual office location for a residential address.
And because you're paying rent, you have to maintain that property which means that you'd have to come back to Australia anyway to cut the lawn/grass etc probably every 3 months or so.
It looks like the only way you can actually work long term remotely overseas through one of these Nomading visas is to go through a sole trader ABN since a sole trader doesn't need an address and if you don't have an address for more than 183 days, you'd be a non resident for tax purposes.
Realistically if I were to go on one of these remote working visas, i'd stay of 6 months/half the year overseas and then come home and stay with my father who has a place in Australia. So i'm guessing I could in that case put my fathers place as the residential address (with his permission) as that would be the address i'd fall back to if I needed to come home but for the duration of 6 months overseas, there would not be any rent paid back in Australia.
What are your thoughts ATO?
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