Sure that happens today, in part because it's so painful to 'do the right thing'. I stayed in San Diego for a month last year and didn't pay a single penny of income tax to the city. Meanwhile my home city was paid for my income and I was a lightweight customer during that month.

I think the idea would be something along the lines of creating virtual citizens that live in the locality and meet all of the obligations of the locality, and the company just handles swapping the association of these citizens to real people when the time comes.

So then when you show up with your passport from Roamatopia all of the paperwork has been done to make sure you are pulling your weight.

Obviously this can be gamed as well but I like the idea.

>I stayed in San Diego for a month last year and didn't pay a single penny of income tax to the city.

States are starting to crack down on income taxes for non-residents working there. Obviously in many cases they have no way of tracking but if you're there on business (and have expenses), Concur for one offers companies an audit service. The rules vary by state but if you spend enough time in a state and pass some threshold you can be on the hook to file income taxes. (A lot of the original impetus for these sorts of laws was to tax entertainers and pro athletes.)

New York City is pretty aggressive about this and has been for at least 7-8 years...at least if you work for a bank headquartered there. I had to provide a separate attestation that I did or did not work over a certain amount of time and, if so, had a bunch of extra paperwork to do.

In my case it was a privately funded trip, nobody at my company had any clue where I was beyond the ones I told.

You wrote: <<I stayed in San Diego for a month last year and didn't pay a single penny of income tax to the city.>>

Where is your citizenship?

If you had young children who attended local schools (even for one month), do you think that is fair? (Assume pay low/zero tax.)

It's not really up to me to say if its fair, it's up to the people of San Diego. I definitely spent a lot more money in town (on vacation) than I would if I lived there full time. That said, I'm guessing most would say it's not fair.

My point though is that this kind of things happens all of the time because there isn't a clean process to handle these situations. The concept of a virtual country could actually help fix this by establishing channels to compensate communities for services used by roaming visitors.

> you're supposed to be tax where you live to finance the public infrastructure you use, pension schemes of locals,

The problem exists only because the cost for most of these services is socialized via general taxes. One possible solution is to pay a flat tax for local services in the place you live for as long as you are there. The pension scheme solution is to select a pension scheme and pay there, no matter where you are located. The problem with these solutions is you cannot have a Bismark pension scheme, lime most of Europe, and the local administrations need to deal with deductions for people with low income, but it is nothing that cannot be solved.