I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing this counts as fraud. Facebook could terminate you if they found out and try to recover wages from you. Nevada might not care since it has no income tax, but most states would care if you were actually resident there and not paying taxes. If you moved to Portland for its lower cost of living, tax officials might not like that you aren't paying taxes to Oregon.
It's a little weird, but most companies seem to want to vary salaries by location, even for remote work. It might not seem fair or correct, but I do think there are reasons you couldn't pull of a scheme like that. The IRS has information sharing agreements with most states.
Let's say you pick Arizona. What happens when your car is registered in Arizona and the IRS tells Arizona that you earned a lot of money and should have paid them thousands? Do you register your car in California, keep a CA license, buy car insurance at the CA address that it isn't garaged at? I know that these are small things and often people don't change this stuff for a few years after college, but at some point it starts adding up to more and more evidence of one's intent to defraud. Do you set up a non-USPS mail-forwarding scheme to make it seem like you're still in CA? If you get into a car crash, will your insurance start looking into why you're always in Arizona?
For Facebook, it wouldn't be too hard for them to figure it out. You'll be connecting to their servers for work from an IP address. Do you keep a server in the CA flat share to proxy everything? What if the box goes down? Worse, this shows real thought going into the fraud. It wasn't a casual, "oh, I thought I was going to be spending most of my time in the $500/mo flat share and just innocently forgot to update that I'm in Arizona basically always" and rather something really intended to defraud.
To keep tax collectors off your back, you'd have to let FB pay CA and then you'd have to pay AZ tax out of your pocket. Even a cheap $500 flat share eats into the profitability of this scheme. If you're earning $200k in CA and offered $150k in AZ, $13k of that will likely be eaten up by expenditures. Plus, with roommate turnover, at what point do people think it's weird to have someone on the lease that basically doesn't exist? How much time and money do you spend on flights for administrative things like flying back to CA to renew your license? Heck, do you vote in CA despite not living there?
It could certainly be profitable, but it does seem like there's significant risk of being caught. I'm not a lawyer, but this feels like defrauding an employer and different states handle background checks differently, but it seems like something that might go on a record that wouldn't be great to explain away. Like, "I was 19 and we thought it would be fun to steal the University sign" is a lot easier to explain than "I thought the company should pay me more so I defrauded them out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars."
It's a little weird, but most companies seem to want to vary salaries by location, even for remote work. It might not seem fair or correct, but I do think there are reasons you couldn't pull of a scheme like that. The IRS has information sharing agreements with most states.
Let's say you pick Arizona. What happens when your car is registered in Arizona and the IRS tells Arizona that you earned a lot of money and should have paid them thousands? Do you register your car in California, keep a CA license, buy car insurance at the CA address that it isn't garaged at? I know that these are small things and often people don't change this stuff for a few years after college, but at some point it starts adding up to more and more evidence of one's intent to defraud. Do you set up a non-USPS mail-forwarding scheme to make it seem like you're still in CA? If you get into a car crash, will your insurance start looking into why you're always in Arizona?
For Facebook, it wouldn't be too hard for them to figure it out. You'll be connecting to their servers for work from an IP address. Do you keep a server in the CA flat share to proxy everything? What if the box goes down? Worse, this shows real thought going into the fraud. It wasn't a casual, "oh, I thought I was going to be spending most of my time in the $500/mo flat share and just innocently forgot to update that I'm in Arizona basically always" and rather something really intended to defraud.
To keep tax collectors off your back, you'd have to let FB pay CA and then you'd have to pay AZ tax out of your pocket. Even a cheap $500 flat share eats into the profitability of this scheme. If you're earning $200k in CA and offered $150k in AZ, $13k of that will likely be eaten up by expenditures. Plus, with roommate turnover, at what point do people think it's weird to have someone on the lease that basically doesn't exist? How much time and money do you spend on flights for administrative things like flying back to CA to renew your license? Heck, do you vote in CA despite not living there?
It could certainly be profitable, but it does seem like there's significant risk of being caught. I'm not a lawyer, but this feels like defrauding an employer and different states handle background checks differently, but it seems like something that might go on a record that wouldn't be great to explain away. Like, "I was 19 and we thought it would be fun to steal the University sign" is a lot easier to explain than "I thought the company should pay me more so I defrauded them out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars."