Do non-official (“non-statutory”) Commission employees pay UK income tax ?
A. Only if they are out of the UK for less than a year. Any non-exempt employee is liable to pay UK income tax if they are “ordinarily resident” in the UK. By UK law, Commission employees who are UK nationals (possibly including visiting scientists, perhaps not – I did not get a definitive answer to this until more than a month after I finished being a Visiting Scientist), are considered to be ordinarily resident in the UK wherever in the EU they work. However, even if you are liable, and even if you are ordinarily resident in the UK, you still do not pay UK tax if you live outside the UK for a “qualifying period” of 365 days: which called the Foreign Earnings Deduction (FED). You can visit for brief periods; the precise definition of “qualifying period” for the FED is defined in UK leaflets IR58 and IR20 (all leaflets are now on the web). Note: the FED was eliminated on March 17th, 1998.
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