The $120 Billion Tax on Global Work

The Scene It is 4:45 PM in Singapore on the last Friday of the month. In a WeWork overlooking Marina Bay, the CFO of a Series B AI startup is staring at a spreadsheet, her third coffee cold beside her. Her engineering team is distributed across six countries: lead developers in Warsaw, data labelers in Nairobi, a DevOps contractor in Buenos Aires. Payroll is due. The USD 85,000 transfer to the company’s Employer of Record (EOR) provider for the Poland team cleared her US bank two days ago. The E