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)

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?

  • annabiancamaria@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Do you have any plans to get the UK citizenship? You may need to declare how much time you have been out of the UK with your application and you don’t want to lie about that. Any reason you can’t or don’t want to get it? With the UK citizenship you don’t have, at least, to worry about losing your settled status.

    • TheRealDynamitri@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Any reason you can’t or don’t want to get it?

      I would be eligible but I don’t want UK to have full rights over me, this country became increasingly more fascist and totalitarian in the past decade and a half, unfortunately.

      I might consider it there’s a new government with a different policy; at this point I’m happy with being a citizen of a different country and knowing I at least have somewhere else to turn to or, at the worst, I will just get kicked out to where I’m originally from which is miles better.