Now that we’ve covered source taxation, US taxation, and Australian taxation, we can finally talk about all the exciting edge cases you hit when trying to file equity-related taxes after moving internationally. Some of these problems are from lack of clarity in one or the other of the domestic tax systems, but most come about from the quirks of how domestic tax systems interact with international tax law.

We’ve talked a little about US equity taxes, but now let’s turn to a different country, and discuss how those same taxes are applied in Australia. If you’re not subject to Australian taxation this might sound irrelevant to you, but we’re going to need two countries to talk about the final details of international tax, so I’d encourage you to stick with it. As ever, I’m not a tax professional: if you spot something that seems off here, I’d love to hear from you.

In my last post, I talked about how source taxation could mean that you end up paying US taxes long after you move away from the US, or state taxes within the US long after you move away from that state. I didn’t talk at all about how those taxes would be calculated though, and we’ll need to understand that to talk about the more complex problems that arise when you move. Let’s run through how the US taxes equity.

Let’s talk tax! Taxes aren’t the most interesting of topics, but as a mass exodus from San Francisco begins in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are a whole bunch of people working at Silicon Valley tech companies who are going to have to start dealing with them in much more depth.

I gave a talk about phishing at a few different conferences last year, and people occasionally ask me for the whitepaper and / or recording. They’re not very discoverable at the moment, so I figure I’ll link them here, and then I’ll have a better answer than “search my browser history”.