What are the post-Brexit rules for doing short term on site services for EU clients

[Dan Warfield]

Our company does training and consulting for IT professionals. Most of this is B2B and many of our clients have EU offices. Now that covid restrictions are lifting, they are asking us to (for example) travel to Amsterdam or Lisbon, etc., to deliver a four-day training course. Whar are the rules for this post-Brexit. Does my consultant need some kind of visa or work permit? It is different for every country? What is the boundary between visa-free business meetings and delivering a course?

 

[Newchodge]

You are proposing to work in a foreign country. You need to check the rules for each country in which you intend to work, but I would expect that you would need a work visa for each person working in each country. Ask yourself the same question about working in the US. It is now, roughly, the same. They are foreign countries.

 

[The Byre]

Germany regards short visits to be business promotion and not requiring visas. Tax-wise, the head office is in the UK and therefore the employee is taxed in the UK and is working in the UK.

 

[Paul Norman]

The exact rules will, indeed, vary from country to country as within the EU each nation is free to manage its borders as it chooses.

I suspect that in most cases there will be no issue unless your total time in the Shengen region exceeds 3 months in any 6.

 

[Dan Warfield]

Thanks for the comments. I have learned from a Portuguese lawyer that I won't need a work visa to spend a week in Lisbon for my particular purposes. It seems some other EU countries have the same approach. But I have also learned that each country has its own rules, so every offer of a short gig in the EU means another legal consultation. Is this one of the benefits of Brexit, or was it always like this? The good news is that the IoD members legal advice service arranged the Portuguese lawyer so there was no extra fee.