Rather than just visiting on a tourist visa and relying on the fact that no immigration officer is going to come bust in your hotel door and yell "hey are you doing work on that laptop!", you go through a bunch of tedious bureaucratic hoops to get the assurance that they definitely for certain won't come inspect what you're doing on your laptop.
But when companies like Shopify go fully remote, if they suddenly have a lot of employees who are frequenting Japan, they are painting a giant target on their back and exposing themselves to legal risk. A company is never going to expose themselves to this kind of legal risk so HR will very quickly (and understandably) clamp down on this. This is why even the most progressive "work from anywhere" policies tend to have fine print that amounts to "your country of residence and any home countries you can legally work in". This is then why we often see "remote" coming with all kinds of conditions like US remote or EU remote etc because the reality of legal compliance for HR is a huge headache.
These nomad visas are a baby step in the right direction towards unburdening companies from this liability.
Could they just hire those individuals as contractors instead? It should be up to the contractor to ensure compliance then. (IANAL)
I once worked at a tiny company, and their first 'contractor' employee didn't realise he had to set aside money for certain taxes, and didn't realise he'd have to record certain details to be able to fill out certain forms, and things like that.
This ended up being a bunch of hassle for the company as he... thought? hoped? expected? that they were paying those taxes, as they would have done if he was a regular employee. Now the guy's resentful, feels you've ripped him off, and is constantly distracted.
Secondly, there can still be local laws you have to comply with. Some countries have problems with sham contractor arrangements, where they insist their normal, regular employees are 'self-employed contractors' to avoid giving them sick pay, holiday, pension, maternity leave, minimum wage, redundancy pay, complying with safety rules, and so on. So they have laws saying that under certain circumstances, contractors effectively turn into regular employees.
As I can't read Kazakh, how am I supposed to know if the Kazakhstani tax code has similar rules?
The most likely explanation is there could be risk but there is zero risk associated with saying no so legal and HR say no to this arrangement because they don't want more work and legal and HR are cost centres so they can't magically pull budget out of thin air to appease some annoying digital nomads. A company is also not going to let their entire workforce of full time employees transition to contractors overnight either, which would be a giant headache for both HR and senior management.
For example VCs prefer "headcount" over contractors for a number of reasons so there is pressure from the top to incentivise full time employees. Large multinationals have a lot of considerations around taxation (its always taxes...)
These are some of the practicalities I've uncovered that provide inertia towards remote working
A small company that doesn't know much about compliance may be happy to call it "freelance", but any bigger company with a professional HR person is going to balk at it, because they want certainty they're compliant, e.g. no misclassification.
They're much more likely to be happy about it if you can stick a local LLC between you and them though.
Even inside EU with freedom of movement spending more than 180 days in single country can lead to tax implications. Doing this globally is even bigger mess as ways of counting time might not be the same.
But if you video it, broadcast it on social media that "OMG I'm driving so fast LOL!", encourage others to do the same, and tag the account of the local police, the situation is different.
