* how do you provide me with health insurance and other governmental benefits?

* for the purposes of anything official, am I as an individual technically unemployed?

* how do you provide me with retirement options such as a 401k?

* how do you report on my earnings to the IRS?

I understood this as "you do work, we pay you, each of us handles our legal concerns in our respective countries".

That does, of course, leave the question of how to actually get paid anonymously, as there are plenty of accounting requirements for businesses that aren’t compatible with anonymity here either.

Your government could say it's illegal to receive money under these circumstances, and they basically do. But think about what that means.

That you're committing tax fraud and will probably spend a non-trivial amount of time in prison for tax avoidance as well as having a significant portion of property seized to pay back taxes?

That's called "job fraud," and it's a crime in most countries.

(The gardener might also be filing 1099s or the equivalent without you knowing, but that doesn’t seem likely.)

Basically, they kept as low as possible the number of people who knew their real identity. That person or persons would verify employment and file the appropriate paperwork.

I don't think that'd be legal in the US. Employer has to at least verify that the person is allowed to work in the US (i.e. a citizen, permanent resident, or a legal alien with some work visa) which requires revealing employee's true identity to HR. Or do you think there is a way to perform this (and other tax regulations) without HR knowing the identity of the person?

The employee happens to be the sole owner of Proglonox, but IBM never needs to know the details about that.

In general if the government gets their cut, they don't care about shell games. It's only when using them to hide from them that they get interested.

But what if you were intending to build something more like Silk Road - a business, but with no identifiable legal entities involved? And avoiding prosecution not by following the law, but by being unidentifiable?

I can say I was nervous enough about the whole picture to decline some work some years back, because the person wanted to pay in crypto and I felt like it would get me in for tax complications even though I was willing to do all necessary reporting. The person was outside the US, so some parts of US employment rules wouldn't have applied. I didn't know the other person's name and I don't think he knew mine. Neither one of us was being cloak and dagger afaict, but we had met online and the question simply didn't come up.

Have an example, besides jobs that are completely in-person and pay is done in cash/without government reporting?

Maybe "Sifu" of DeFi protocol Wonderland[0], or "UmbralUpsilon" of Indexed Finance[1], to take just a couple of examples.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120762

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31478795

I have trouble seeing why a company would contract with a party they can't sue in the event of non-performance, unless they're a much cheaper/better option.

As others have said, that doesn't mean you can't go by a "pen name" if you like assuming the company is reasonably flexible with email addresses, employee directories, etc.

Any contractor making >= $600 have to fill the payment and they receive a 1099.

There are very few exceptions to that and they are listed in the article.

"businesses that contract with S Corps do not need to issue them a Form 1099-MISC"

I'm an s-corp, and yet I still have people 1099ing me. It's more annoying than anything because I get all my tax stuff done quickly, and someone will send out a late 1099 with slightly different numbers (typically error on their end) and... I've just given up caring about that.

"You don't send 1099s to your landscaping service, or your office supply store purchases, or the energy company, but you've contracted services with them." "Oh, but you're a person"... with an s-corp registered for 10+ years and a separate employer TIN.

If the contractor fails to furnish a TIN, you are not required to cease business with them, however you will likely have to respond to the IRS and show that they refused to tell you when you file the 1099s each year.

The IRS can assess a $50 civil penalty against the contractor (doubt they bother due to low amount set in statute), but more importantly the employer must withhold 30% backup withholding due to the failure to provide TIN. The employer will have to report the income and withholding on their tax return, which will likely be held up while the IRS verifies the match.

I-9/E-Verify is for employees of your entity only and is not completed for independent contractors, nor for temp/contract labor who is employed by a different company (they do the form).

The part about the 1099 reporting does agree with the parent comment, however, added some additional context about what happens if the contractor refuses and what exactly the business's responsibility is, which I thought was relevant to this discussion.

However if they believe you are a USA citizen or reside in the USA while doing the work, then they are supposed to.

Yes, you do.

To me, it seems excessive, and incompatible with the principles of a generally free society. I'm not convinced that any history of unfair labor practice justifies such reporting obligations, which imply some obligation to refuse to accept payment in exchange for performing some perfectly legal work. It seems to be that the purpose of this requirement is the convenience of enforcement of tax compliance and nothing more.

Anyone doesn't have to do this; businesses have to do this, and only for certain kinds of services and business relationships with individuals or partnerships. (e.g., my publisher has to send a 1099 to me, one of their authors, but doesn't need to send a 1099 to Ingram, their printing company.)

> It seems to be that the purpose of this requirement is the convenience of enforcement of tax compliance

I don't think anyone's made any (plausible) claim that any IRS reporting requirement is somehow related to the history of unfair labor practice? The IRS is interested in finding out how much tax they're owed; it's not like they're being provided the data to make some kind of judgement about whether contractors are being paid fairly.

Being able to associate != hiring someone for a job

If you need to pay your friends >$600 to hang out with you, you should probably re-evaluate your life.

To me, it seems as absurd as having to file a report with the government on anyone you meet. I can see justification in narrow cases, but requiring it universally seems ridiculous to me.

> I'm not suggesting it's necessary to pay any person you associate with.

So you agree the right to free association is orthogonal to the idea of hiring people to do a paid job then, right? In which case, how is having labor hiring laws a violation of free association, when you agree you can still freely associate with people? In which case, arguing "free association" in terms of arguing that labor hiring laws being unjust isn't really a valid argument then, huh?

Like, I can go down to a park with a group of friends and not have to tell the government about it. I can attend a church and practice and not have to tell the government about it. I can have a dinner party at my home with my friends and not have to tell the government about it. I can freely associate with whoever I want, that's not a crime.

I can't hire a bunch of people who are not legally allowed to work in this country, as currently the government wants to disincentive unrestricted immigration and have made this action of paying people for labor they deem improper illegal. This is an immigration policy, not a free association policy. FWIW, I'm one to argue we should relax some hiring practices and reduce barriers to immigration in many ways, but this really isn't a "free association" kind of issue.

The requirements kick in when people are trying to avoid paying social security tax, basically, or paying for work under the table.

Far more likely is that these companies aren't well-footed legally and don't realize that they'll only be able to stay under the radar while small. Which is common, but puts a cap on how high-profile they can grow. They'll need to sort things out before they can scale or get involved in regulated industries.

Plenty of contractors are basically employees paying less taxes and not having holidays.

(not that I'm complaining, I'm glad there is a legal way to minimise how much the government steals from me)

States are a bit trickier because healthcare is so ridiculously overpriced and therefore people value health insurance provided by an employer. I never even bothered to sign up for the private health insurance I had in the UK and just either user the crappy public one or paid out of pocket, finding the best doctor for the job (instead of what my insurance would have offered).

The obvious way (mentioned elsewhere here) is that you can reasonably provide services as a business - non-anonymously, non-pseudonymously, disclosing the exact legal identity of your shell company instead of your personal details.

Yea, but I suspect these are all going to be remote jobs with people in other countries at which point they're all contractors. It's only people in the same country as the company since generally the thing they're trying to avoid is tax evasion and they don't care if they can't tax you.

Owners can no longer hide their identity with a shell company after a recent law.

You could try to set up a company to hide your identity, but how well that works depends on the jurisdiction (in many places it's trivial to figure out the director of a company).