An increasingly common situation in the IT and consulting world is: You live and physically stay forever in your homeland (Bosnia and Herzegovina), but you are hired by a foreign company (e.g., from the USA or Germany) which has NO locally established office, ID number, or branch in your country at all. How, in that situation, completely within the framework of legality and law, can you receive a foreign monthly foreign exchange salary payment into your residence account while paying for public health and pension?
If you agree "on hand and see what happens" and a foreign company sends you exclusively a bare net "allowance" through a foreign exchange transfer from the USA as a donation or similar to your private current account on the 1st of every month – you are committing an uncorrectable and extremely serious criminal failure of tax evasion and lack of unpaid public state health tax contributions into the budget. Your checking or foreign exchange swift transfer is not visible to the obligatory state systems and requires a rapid calculation by local regulations on contributions.
A company from the USA contracts and pays for the service through special so-called umbrella Employer of Record (Deel, Remote.com, etc.) networks and agencies which legally and with a legal office exist and are registered in the local state (Bosnia and Herzegovina). You are employed by that EoR agency. Your salary undergoes a full traditional tax and administrative passage with all local accounting, tax papers (Porezna uprava (FBiH/RS)), contributions, and other bureaucratic papers. The foreign corporation issues an invoice with reimbursement to the account of the EoR agency through the system. Absolutely 100% binding and transparent.
If both of you do not even want a local intermediary agency, the law of most tax jurisdictions allows you to simply submit a signed employment contract from a foreign country to the local tax administration (Porezna uprava (FBiH/RS)). Then you take over the role of the company and the calculation of contributions fully – yourself, manually!
Agreement and signing of a foreign gross contract which clearly states your obligation to independently redirect all local costs and contributions from the transfer to budget entities.
They pay you a huge, clean Total Employer Cost (so-called Gross 2 in the Croatian sense) all at once on the 1st of every month to your foreign exchange current account via bank transfer.
Within the specified legal deadline (e.g., a few days) from receipt of the money, you as a worker must fill out the entire obligation form for the amount yourself on the local tax portal (nacionalni digitalni sustav) – and pay the slips for Pension (PIO/MIO fond), Health Insurance (Zavod zdravstvenog osiguranja), and income tax to your institutions so that you are left with a clean and legally permitted remaining net amount.
By far the most tax-efficient way in which a large number of international consultants and programmers work (avoiding huge tax pressure through a classic salary), is that the worker themselves takes over the business through a local "Sole Proprietorship/Agency with a lump-sum nature of contributions" and functions via B2B invoicing charging an amount to a foreign company every month. Then, from that earned business profit, one extracts monthly legal slips for the lump sum. Caution: Due to too many lump-sum taxpayers with 1 single foreign client in full working time, tax administrations across the region monitor such cases and often punish so-called "Hidden Non-Self-Employment Relationships on a lump-sum basis" with extremely high fines.