ANOBAG / working for a non-Swiss company

Visas, Permits, Passports and Naturalization
1

Imagine you are considering an employment offer from a company that has no seat in Switzerland. That company sits in Country A (EU), would only need you to be there 5 days per months and is otherwise happy for you to stay in Switzerland or travel. How can this be arranged in terms of social security, taxes and permits? I tried to read up a bit on ANOBAG, but I have more questions that answers.

ANOBAG is a way for employees of a company without a registered seat in Switzerland to live in Switzerland and be insured for purposes of social security. In my rough understanding, the principle is that the employee would pay employee’s and employer’s share of social security (AHV, ALV, pension fund), can have an arrangement with the company to be reimbursed for that, and then is insured like a normal Swiss employee. Apparently, there are different constellations possible depending on specific conditions. A taste of this can be found here:

Questions:

  • Is the employment contract then usually under Swiss law or under law of company seat? Would it usually define place of work as Switzerland / remote?
  • I assume income from this job is taxed in Switzerland. If salaries are taxed at source in Country A, can company avoid paying tax there in the first place or would that have to be reclaimed? Can it?
  • What are the implications on residence permit in Switzerland, assuming employee is on C permit?
  • Can pension fund conditions be freely negotiated between company and employee, and then paid into ANOBAG? I am thinking about total insured salary, total %, employer share, and insurance for death / invalidity.
  • Can under ANOBAG be arranged that 700 days of sick leave are insured?
  • What happens in case of termination of employment by employer? I assume that one would simply become like any other unemployed Swiss resident and receive RAV. Any pitfalls there?
  • What is a cost estimate for administering an ANOBAG employment for the company (not the actual social security payments, but handling agents etc.)?
  • Other traps?

I would love to hear your thoughts, ideally from own experience. It seems all complicated, and I can imagine that employers might not like this one bit.

Thank you.

2

Other:

  • Sick leave, there’s a certain threshold of days covered by Swiss employer by additional insurance, how’s that arranged in this scheme?

Apart from that, Employers generally avoid individual booking as it complicates the audits of their books. That’s why medium to large company would offload all contractors’ payroll into a 3rd party. If they would need to make a special accounting in your case I bet it falls in the same category, PITA to deal with for them. I would love to hear that it’s different.

3

I have no idea, but as @sichuan said most companies will prefer to work with someone like Deel. You’re then technically employed by a Swiss employer.

4

Yeah, that is what I mean with admin cost.

5

Just upping this. So nobody with real-life experience?

6

And up.

7

I wonder if you have advanced any further in your research on this? I am considering ANobAG with an EU company that has no presence in CH. Would love to hear your experience and findings.

Thanks!

8

We did not make any progress. The company did not like the ANOBAG thing one bit as it created manual work on non-standard processes for them. It may have been a pretext for something else they did not like, but at the end the process went nowhere.

I could see this come up again, so please if you are getting closer on this keep this thread updated. I have to date never met a person who actually worked under ANOBAG.