Do I still need to file taxes with the Canadian government if I am working in the U.S. on a TN visa for a few years?
"You are considered a Canadian resident if you have ""significant residential ties to Canada"". Because your wife lives in Canada, you therefore are a resident. Even by working temporarily in the US, you are still considered a ""factual resident"" of Canada. Due to that, your second question is irrelevant." "The other answer has mentioned ""factual resident"", and you have raised the existence of a U.S./Canada tax treaty in your comment, and provided a link to a page about determining residency. I'd like to highlight part of the first link: You are a factual resident of Canada for tax purposes if you keep   significant residential ties in Canada while living or travelling   outside the country. The term factual resident means that, although you left Canada, you   are still considered to be a resident of Canada for income tax   purposes. Notes If you have established ties in a country that Canada has a tax treaty   with and you are considered to be a resident of that country, but you   are otherwise a factual resident of Canada, meaning you maintain   significant residential ties with Canada, you may be considered a   deemed non-resident of Canada for tax purposes. [...] I'll emphasize that ""considered to be a resident of Canada for income tax purposes"" means you do need to file Canadian income tax returns. The Notes section does indicate the potential treaty exemption that you mentioned, but it is only a potential exemption. Note the emphasis (theirs, not mine) on the word ""may"" in the last paragraph above. Please don't assume ""may"" is necessarily favorable with respect to your situation. The other side of the ""may"" coin is ""may not"". The Determining your residency status page you mentioned in your comment says this: If you want the Canada Revenue Agency's opinion on your residency   status, complete either Form NR74, Determination of Residency Status   (Entering Canada) or Form NR73, Determination of Residency Status   (Leaving Canada), whichever applies, and send it to the International   and Ottawa Tax Services Office. To get the most accurate opinion,   provide as many details as possible on your form. So, given your ties to Canada, I would suggest that until and unless you have obtained an opinion from the Canada Revenue Agency on your tax status, you would be making a potentially unsafe assumption if you yourself elect not to file your Canadian income tax returns based on your own determination. You could end up liable for penalties and interest if you don't file while you are outside of Canada. Tax residency in Canada is not a simple topic. For instances, let's have a look at S5-F1-C1, Determining an Individual’s Residence Status. It's a long page, but here's one interesting piece:  1.44 The Courts have stated that holders of a United States Permanent Residence Card (otherwise referred to as a Green Card) are   considered to be resident in the United States for purposes of   paragraph 1 of the Residence article of the Canada-U.S. Tax   Convention. For further information, see the Federal Court of Appeal's   comments in Allchin v R, 2004 FCA 206, 2004 DTC 6468.   [...] ... whereas you are in the U.S. on a TN visa, intended to be temporary. So you wouldn't be exempt just on the basis of your visa and the existence of the treaty. The CRA would look at other circumstances. Consider the ""Centre of vital interests test"": Centre of vital interests test [...] “If the individual has a permanent home in both Contracting States, it   is necessary to look at the facts in order to ascertain with which of   the two States his personal and economic relations are closer. Thus,   regard will be had to his family and social relations, his   occupations, his political, cultural or other activities, his place of   business, the place from which he administers his property, etc. The   circumstances must be examined as a whole, but it is nevertheless   obvious that considerations based on the personal acts of the   individual must receive special attention. If a person who has a home   in one State sets up a second in the other State while retaining the   first, the fact that he retains the first in the environment where he   has always lived, where he has worked, and where he has his family and   possessions, can, together with other elements, go to demonstrate that   he has retained his centre of vital interests in the first State.” [emphasis on last sentence is mine] Anyway, I'm acquainted with somebody who left Canada for a few years to work abroad. They assumed that living in the other country for that length of time (>2 years) meant they were non-resident here and so did not have to file. Unfortunately, upon returning to Canada, the CRA deemed them to have been resident all that time based on significant ties maintained, and they subsequently owed many thousands of dollars in back taxes, penalties, and interest. If it were me in a similar situation, I would err on the side of caution and continue to file Canadian income taxes until I got a determination I could count on from the people that make the rules."
There are a few reasons: 1) Deductions and credits. We have a lot of them. While I suppose we could pass this information on to our employers for them to file, why would we want to? That just unnecessarily adds a middle-man as well as sharing potentially private information more than it needs to be shared. This is the one that effects the most people. 2) Income sources. While normal employment, contract work, and normal investment income already gets reported to the IRS, this is not true for all sources of income. For one, the U.S. is almost completely by itself on actually taxing income that its citizens earn outside of the U.S. While this policy is completely absurd, the only way for the government to know about such income is for the person to report it, since the IRS can't require foreign employers to send information to them. Also, barter income as well as other income that doesn't meet the qualifications for the payer to be required to inform the government requires the employee to self-report. Similarly, capital gains on things outside of normal investments (real estate, for instance) require self-reporting. Having said all of this, U.S. reporting requirements are absurd and illogical. For instance, the IRS already knows about all of my stock trading activity. My broker is required to report it to them. Yet, I still have to list out every single trade on my own return, which is really tedious and completely redundant. For charitable contributions, on the other hand, I only have to give the IRS the final total without listing out all of the individual donations, despite the fact that they don't have that information made available to them by another source. It makes no sense at all, but such is the federal government. "I made a throwaway for this...   I work in IT for the government. I was tasked with finding a vendor that provided a particular kind of software. My bosses expected it would take me 4-6 months to source out companies, go through all the paperwork and process to work with them, try to get them to understand what we need, and them aid them in implementing their software on our stack.   Well, that seemed like an enormous waste of time (and ridiculously boring), so instead I wrote the software on my own time over the course of 4 months, built a subscription model around it, and incorporated a company. I've since sold the subscription based model to a number of other government bodies and clients. The government body I work for has around 250 employees, and I recently sold a subscription to a peer government body with over 1500 employees.   I built a free subscription tier that my current company uses so that i'm not taking any payment from them, to avoid any conflicts of interest, and built the entire project on my own time and resources.   The funny thing is, the software product I built easily beat out all the competitors in blind tests, and no one that I work for could ever imagine that I am capable of even being employed by such a company, forget building the whole stack and founding the company. In fact, all of upper management has been impressed with the software I ""found"", and how well it has worked... there has been a ton of positive feedback on it since it was launched.   I'm basically just sitting on this project (that is mostly self sustaining), until I can just cash out - which should be quite soon.   **Edit** to the people warning me what i'm doing is illegal, a few key points    - 1) The public sector can't legally profit from anything, my job is to limit cost, not make a profit... which leads to...    - 2) I'm not charging the government body I work for, it's a free implementation devoid of contract. I also ensured I do all the work on my own time, not company time. I live somewhere where most government employees work multiple jobs, so this isn't uncommon. In fact, my government body actually does often hire contractors who are also employed. So not only did I create the service on my own time, I gave it to my employer for free (other companies pay, of course)    - 3) I don't live in the US, things are different where I am. It is certainly not illegal, and I would even argue that (given this is the public sector) it is even somewhat ethical. My work saved my employer (the tax payer) a significant amount of money, which is a net positive. The service is of high quality, and I did not break any employment agreements or laws in the process.     - 4) I hired a lawyer to double check everything.     - 5) I absolutely am not in any way using any proprietary information for profit. I'm not even using my contacts through work as leverage for sales - everything so far has been cold calls and positive references from other clients. This was a key part of the project." "The IRS taxes worldwide income of its citizens and green card holders.  Generally, for those Americans genuinely living/working overseas the IRS takes the somewhat reasonable position of being in ""2nd place"" tax-wise.  That is, you are expected to pay taxes in the country you are living in, and these taxes can reduce the tax you would have owed in the USA.  Unfortunately, all of this has to be documented and tax returns are still required every year.  Your European friends may find this quite surprising as I've heard, for instance, that France will not tax you if you go live and work in Germany.   A foreign company operating in a foreign country under foreign law is not typically required to give you a W-2, 1099, or any of the forms you are used to. Indeed, you should be paying taxes in the place where you live and work, which is probably somewhat different than the USA.  Keep all these records as they may be useful for your USA taxes as well.  You are required to total up what you were paid in Euros and convert them to US$.  This will go on the income section of a 1040.  You should be paying taxes in the EU country where you live.  You can also total those up and convert to US$.  This may be useful for a foreign tax credit. If you are living in the EU long term, like over 330 days/year or you have your home and family there, then you might qualify for a very large exemption from your income for US tax purposes, called the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion.  This is explained in IRS Publication 54.  The purpose of this is primarily to avoid double taxation. FBAR is a serious thing.  In past years, the FBAR form went to a Financial Crimes unit in Detroit, not the regular IRS address.  Also, getting an extension to file taxes does not extend the deadline for the FBAR.   Some rich people have paid multi-million dollar fines over FBAR and not paying taxes on foreign accounts.  I've heard you can get a $10,000 FBAR penalty for inadvertent, non-willful violations so be sure to send those in and it goes up from there to $250k or half the value of the account, whichever is more.  You also need to know about whether you need to do FATCA reporting with your 1040.  There are indeed, a lot of obnoxious things you need to know about that came into existence over the years and are still on the law books -- because of the perpetual 'arms race' between the government and would be cheaters, non-payers and their advisors.  http://www.irs.gov/publications/p54/ http://americansabroad.org/" I called the IRS (click here for IRS contact info) and they said I do not need to get a new EIN.  I could have just filed the appropriate employer federal tax return (940/941) and then the filing requirements would have been updated.  But while I was on the phone, they just updated the filing requirements for my LLC so I am all good now (I still need to file the correct form and make the correct payments, etc. but I can use this same EIN going forward). Disclaimer: Don't trust me (or this answer) for tax advice (your situation may be different).  The IRS person on the phone was very helpful so I recommend calling them if you are in a similar situation.  FYI, I have found calling the IRS to always be very helpful. In Singapore, this is sufficiently common that the Singapore IRS has a page on their website dedicated to informing employers of how to properly pay this under Responsibilites of an Employer.   Specifically, tax paid by employer is taxable income for the employee (as it's really the employee's responsibility), so they must pay tax for that tax.  A tax-on-tax is computed for the tax paid, which also would be owed by the employer if they were paying the full tax rate for the employee. As a clarification, this is not the employer being truly responsible for the employee's income; this is the employer compensating the employee further to offset their taxable income.  This is effectively a fringe benefit, although it may be particularly useful in countries where either tax evasion is common (and thus an employer must compete with employers willing to pay under the table) or where employers are competing with others in nearby countries with lower tax rates.  It is not the same thing as the employer making your income nontaxable, though, and has implications for your tax filing. Significantly, it is likely that if you have additional income beyond income from that employer, it is likely to be taxed at your highest tax rate, as the employer will likely calculate the tax due based on their income being the only income you have in that year. *Edit based on emphasis in question: I'm not from Singapore nor am I a lawyer, but based on my reading of the IRAS website, it looks like you do not have to file if you have no other source of income, because they have a No-Filing Service which takes income information from your employer automatically and generates a tax bill, which presumably would be fully paid in your case.  This only aplies if you have no other sources of income, however; you still have to file if you have other sources of income since your employer would not know about them. If you are eligible for this service, you should get a letter informing you as such.  They also have a tool to check your filing status on their website. As far as the RRSP goes, see my answer in  self directed RRSP for a non resident Don't forget to file your FBAR and form 8938, if applicable. -Jon "From what you've described, your spouse is a non-resident alien for US tax purposes. You have two choices: Use the Nonresident Spouse Treated As Resident election and file as Married Filing Jointly. Since your spouse doesn't have, and doesn't currently qualify for, an SSN, he/she will need to apply for an ITIN together with the tax filing. Note that by becoming a resident alien, your spouse's worldwide income the whole year would be subject to US taxes, and would need to be reported on your joint tax filing, though he/she will be able to use the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion to exclude $100k of her foreign earned income, since he/she will have been out of the US for 330 days in a 12-month period. Or, file as Married Filing Separately. You write ""NRA"" for your spouse's SSN on your tax return. As a nonresident alien, if your spouse doesn't have any US income, he/she doesn't have to file a US tax return, and doesn't need to apply for an ITIN. Which one is better is up to you to figure out." If your gross income is only $3000, then you don't need to file: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p501.pdf That said, pay careful attention to: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxpayers-living-abroad You should be reporting ALL income, without regard to WHERE you earned it, on your US taxes. Not doing so could indeed get you in trouble if you are audited. Your level of worry depends on how much of the tax law you are willing to dodge, and how lucky you feel.