Year-end is full of people on the move.

Some are heading home for the holidays, some are traveling for last-minute meetings, and some are quietly adding WFH notifications to their calendar without realizing it might trigger tax obligations.

Truth is, work is wherever people open their laptops now; in airports, guest rooms, Airbnbs, coworking spaces, coffee shops, and occasionally in a different city than they told payroll.

It’s human. It’s normal.

But it makes year-end compliance… complicated. It’s the season of:

• “Wait… how many days did this employee actually spend in New York?”
• Surprise nexus and residency thresholds
• Payroll teams rushing to correct state withholding
• Finance uncovering tax exposure in places they didn’t expect
• Travelers insisting they didn’t work from California (while their calendar says otherwise)

The good news? With the right location intelligence and automation, year-end becomes a whole lot simpler (and way more defensible come April 15th).

Let’s walk through the major things worth checking before you close the books on 2025.

1. Get a True Picture of Where Employees Worked This Year

Self-reported location data is… charming. But not accurate. People round down, forget trips, ignore partial days, and assume “working from Mom’s house” doesn’t count.

According to a recent Deloitte Survey, 88% of tax leaders expect increased scrutiny from tax authorities over cross-border work in the next 12–24 months.

In layman's terms, that means tear-end is where you replace guesses with real location insights to avoid any legal hiccups in the new year.

Now’s the time to:

• Compare actual-day counts to employee self-reports
• Flag unreported travel, state hops, or international days
• Spot anyone who quietly created unexpected tax exposure
• Ensure that remote, hybrid, and traveling workers are counted accurately

Monaeo works by helping to save your team hours on tedious admin tasks. The platform passively captures work location data in the background, privately, securely, and automatically. This gives you access to your organization’s full story without chasing people for calendar exports or Slack confirmations.

2. Check All Tax Day Counts & Thresholds

December is “threshold season”, aka the time when exposure sneaks up quietly:

• New York residency day counts
• New York City UBT exposure
• California and Texas business presence
• 183-day residency triggers
• State-to-state withholding thresholds
• International tax presence limits

If someone crosses a line now, realistically, you won’t feel the pain until tax season, BUT, that’s when it becomes much harder to fix reactively. Monaeo makes this painless by creating proactive threshold alerts that trigger automatically, showing you who’s approaching risk in real time, before you lock in year-end payroll and before a tax notice hits your inbox.

3. Review Business Traveler Activity for Exposure

Business travelers rarely stay exactly where they planned. Trips extend, meetings move, and people hop between cities without looping in HR, Finance, or Payroll. Over time, those “small changes” can quietly turn into real compliance exposure.

Before closing the books, make sure you:

• Confirm all traveler day counts are accurate and complete
• Flag cities, states, or countries where tax or payroll exposure may have been created
• Verify withholding and reporting obligations were triggered and handled correctly
• Identify trips that effectively became short-term or informal assignments

Monaeo’s reports turn this into a fast, defensible cleanup, replacing assumptions and spreadsheets with clear, audit-ready insight into traveler activity, exposure, and next steps.

4. Review Remote & Hybrid Worker Patterns

Remote work is fantastic until tax laws enter the chat. What started as a flexible schedule can quietly drift into unexpected exposure when days stack up in the wrong place.

Year-end is the moment to zoom out and look for patterns, not just one-off trips:

• Did remote employees spend extended time in higher-tax states or cities?
• Did anyone unintentionally trigger nexus, residency, or payroll obligations?
• Did “hybrid” schedules slowly turn into something entirely different?
• Are remote-work approvals and policies still aligned with how people actually worked?

This isn’t about policing flexibility—it’s about making sure flexibility doesn’t turn into surprise filings, backdated corrections, or uncomfortable conversations with Finance and Payroll.

Monaeo shows you exactly where work happened and for how long, so policies, approvals, and reality finally line up—with clear signals on what needs attention before it becomes a problem.

5. Make Sure Your Documentation Is Audit-Proof

This is the part that’s easy to push to the bottom of the list and the part that causes the most stress when questions come up later.

When an audit or inquiry happens, it usually starts with a simple request for records. What determines how painful that process becomes is whether your data is already organized, complete, and tied back to real rules (not scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and memory). You won’t be judged on what you intended to track—only on what you can prove. This is the time to collect, confirm, and organize:

• Location logs with verified data
• Day-count summaries by jurisdiction
• Threshold alerts and risk flags
• State-by-state and country-level travel reports
• Payroll adjustments tied to actual presence
• Presence reports mapped to specific tax and residency rules

When documentation is scattered or incomplete, audits turn into long email threads, manual reconstructions, and “best guess” explanations no one feels good about.

Monaeo auto-generates audit-defensible reports across jurisdictions, so when someone eventually sends that dreaded “We’re reviewing your records…” email, you’re ready (aka: calm, confident, and backed by data).

6. Validate Payroll Withholding & Corrections

Payroll gets complicated fast when people work across state lines—and it doesn’t take much for things to fall out of sync. A few extra days here, an extended trip there, and suddenly withholding isn’t as straightforward as it once was.

Managing multi-state payroll is widely recognized as a major compliance challenge for employers. For example, 53% of companies have incurred payroll penalties due to non-compliance in the last five years, showing just how common withholding and reporting issues can be when processes aren’t aligned. 

Before year-end, take a close look at:

• Whether state withholding aligns with where work actually happened
• Retroactive corrections tied to misreported or missed days
• Shadow payroll requirements that may have been triggered
• Tax presence that should have prompted earlier adjustments

These issues aren’t just administrative headaches. They add real cost. Monaeo gives Payroll a reliable foundation; clean day counts, clear location timelines, and the confidence that you’re working from facts, not best guesses.

7. Identify Any Nexus or Permanent Establishment Risk

Companies with distributed workforces saw a 35% increase in potential PE risk findings in 2023–2024.

This finding highlights a significant compliance challenge where remote employees working in various jurisdictions may inadvertently create a permanent establishment (PE) risk for their company. A PE is generally a fixed place of business that can trigger a corporate tax liability in that local jurisdiction. 

The 35% increase can be attributed to several factors:

• The rapid and widespread shift to remote work following the pandemic, placing employees in new tax jurisdictions without prior corporate infrastructure.
• Increased scrutiny from global tax authorities who are updating enforcement rules to capture revenue from highly digitalized and mobile business models.
• Difficulties companies face in tracking exactly where their employees are physically working and for how long. 

Companies must proactively manage employee locations and adhere to local tax regulations to mitigate these elevated risks. It only takes one person working a few too many days in the wrong place to trigger:

• Nexus
• Permanent Establishment
• Local filing requirements
• Entity-level tax exposure

To avoid, companies should review:

• Cities and states with high business traveler activity
• Remote worker hotspots
• Locations where you may have exceeded presence thresholds

Monaeo gives Payroll clean day counts and clear location timelines, so withholding decisions are based on facts, not estimates. It helps teams catch issues earlier, make corrections once (not repeatedly), and move on with confidence knowing the data will hold up if it’s ever reviewed.

8. Track International Days for Multi-Country Exposure

International travel is where things get complicated fast. 88% of global mobility professionals reported that complexity has increased, largely due to evolving regulations and cross-border work patterns, highlighting how difficult it is to manage mobility and compliance across multiple countries.

The challenge is that international rules don’t leave much room for interpretation. They’re strict, they vary by country, and they don’t care whether the work was planned or informal. Year-end is your chance to slow things down and take a clear look at where time was actually spent, including:

• Days approaching or crossing 183-day residency thresholds
• Work spread across multiple countries over the year
• Social security and other technical requirements that may apply
• Whether treaty protections help (or don’t)
• Permanent Establishment risk tied to work activities
• “Working vacations” employees often forget to flag

This isn’t about blame or micromanagement. It’s about visibility, so Finance, Payroll, and Mobility aren’t caught off guard later. Monaeo maps international days clearly and consistently across countries, so thresholds don’t get missed, exposure doesn’t go unnoticed, and surprises don’t show up after the year is closed.

9. Review Your Remote-Work & Travel Policies

The cost of getting this wrong adds up quickly. Most audits don’t happen because companies ignore the rules. They happen because policies quietly fall out of step with how people actually work. 

And policies age fast, especially when work models change every few months. Remote days turn into weeks. Business travel blurs into hybrid schedules. International trips become more frequent and less predictable. What made sense two years ago might not hold up anymore. 

In fact, this is still a very reactive area of business. According to KPMG, 60% of companies discovered compliance issues only after internal reviews or audits.

Year-end is the right moment to pause and ask some honest questions:

• Do our policies still reflect how work really happens today?
• Are employees following them or filling in the gaps on their own?
• Are approvals and guardrails clear enough to prevent accidental exposure?
• Do thresholds, restrictions, or approval requirements need to change for 2026?

This isn’t about adding friction or tightening control. It’s about making sure your rules are realistic, defensible, and aligned with reality so they actually reduce risk instead of creating blind spots.

Monaeo helps reinforce policies with real data, giving you a clear, factual foundation for updates, approvals, and decisions, before gaps turn into audit issues.

10. Celebrate What You Survived & Learned in 2025

Tax compliance is hard. Distributed work makes it harder. And yet, you kept your company protected through shifting rules, surprise employee travel, and endless threshold calculations.

You caught issues before they became problems. You avoided messes you’ll never hear about. You dealt with last-minute changes, fuzzy timelines, and more “quick questions” than anyone could count—and the company stayed protected because of it.

Before you shut the laptop and mentally check out, it’s worth pausing to:

• Notice what didn’t go wrong this year
• Appreciate having cleaner data than you’ve had in the past
• Write down a few things you’d do differently next time
• Carry forward what actually worked
• Say thank you to the people who helped untangle things along the way

No victory speeches. No gold stars. Just a quiet acknowledgment that this stuff is hard. You did a lot, especially considering employees tend to travel like free-range chickens.

Take the win. And now, go recharge.

Ready to Make 2026 Your Most Confident, Compliant Year Yet?

Tax rules won’t slow down next year. Employees won’t stop moving. And spreadsheets definitely won’t magically start updating themselves. But with Monaeo, all that complexity becomes a whole lot simpler.

Monaeo gives you:

• Automated, passive work location tracking
• Real-time threshold alerts
• Audit-defensible reports
• Clean, accurate day counts
• Peace of mind for Payroll, HR, Finance, and the C-suite
• A dramatically easier tax season

If you want to see how much simpler your year could be, we’d love to show you. Chat with our team and take Monaeo for a spin today!