I have been in Japan for about 3 years now. I have 5 years engineer visa.
I have been working remotely in a USA-based company part-time after work, about 200-250k yen a month, almost freelancing, for a year and a half, and stopped working 6 months ago, I didn’t tell my company as my company doesn’t strict working outside of worktime.
The thing is I totally forgot about filing taxes, as tax really didn’t cross my mind at all because my main company takes care of all tax-related stuff, and even back in my home country it was the same, I didn’t touch tax-related stuff since my first ever job, so dumb me didn’t even care to research about side income tax and took it for granted.
And recently I have started to make about 300k yen a month from music streaming via Tunecore Japan, and I thought, wait what about tax, and I searched it and found out that if it’s 200k+ a year, I have to pay taxes.
So question is, should I start paying taxes immediately from this month? And what about the taxes of my old USA-based freelancing job? will it screw me over when I try to renew my visa? All of those side incomes were/are transferred directly to my bank account.
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/v538sd/about_side_income_tax_of_year_ago_and_current/
5 comments
Pay taxes in the US.
“I never worked remotely in Japan”
When you say “transferred to my bank account”, was it a Japanese bank account ? If yes… even if you’ve been here only 3 years, that was taxable. 200-250k a month is unfortunately not easily hidden small potatoes, in case you get an audit you’ll be in trouble, you basically evaded taxes for when you were freelancing. If you want to come clean, you’d better contact the tax office -yourself-, after a talk with an accountant maybe, the good thing about the tax office here is that they tend to be helpful and sometimes even lenient if you are the one coming.
Tax returns for the previous year are in March, the local taxes are calculated based on that and where you were living on Jan 1st. So the Tunecore thing will have to be declared next year.
For the time being, focus on the freelancing work…
Check out /r/JapanFinance
You’ll need to pay tax in Japan for your freelance work as it was performed in Japan. Far better to come clean and pay up as soon as you can – tax authorities are far more lenient that way. You can go to the tax office directly but you may want to get a tax accountant to help.
If you haven’t done so already then you’ll also want to make sure both the freelance work and the other income are within the scope of your visa.
If the money never enters Japan, you don’t have to pay shit.
If you deposit this money to a bank account in Japan, they know and you must pay.