Can employees of a shared services centre work remotely without jeopardising the tax exemption under a Special Economic Zone or the Polish Investment Zone?

In practice, an increasing number of companies in the services sector now operate under a model that, just a few years ago, many would have regarded as transitional. A company has office space for 100 people, yet employs 400 or 500. Some employees work on-site, some in a hybrid arrangement, and some almost entirely remotely.

From a business perspective, this no longer surprises anyone. From the standpoint of Special Economic Zones and the Polish Investment Zone, however, the question arises with regularity: in a model of this kind, can one still speak of business activity carried on within the zone or within the area specified in the investment support decision?

In my view, the answer is, as a general rule, yes. Remote working by shared services centre employees should not automatically result in the loss of the tax exemption. It is, however, essential to draw a very clear distinction between two things: the location from which an individual employee performs their duties, and the location in which the entrepreneur genuinely conducts and organises its business activity.

And it is precisely this distinction that is of the greatest importance here.

Not every employee’s home address constitutes a new place of business

In manufacturing, the intuition is relatively straightforward. It is easy to point to the production hall, the assembly line, the factory warehouse, or the facility where the product is made. In services, the situation is different. The output of work is very often intangible in nature: data analysis, accounting process management, HR, IT, compliance, procurement, or customer service support. Services of this kind can be performed using digital tools, without the entire team being physically present in one place on a daily basis.

This does not mean, however, that the business “dissolves” geographically and ceases to be conducted at the facility covered by the support.

In my assessment, in the case of a shared services centre, the place of business must be evaluated more broadly: through the lens of infrastructure, process organisation, the reporting lines of employees, the place of management, and the location of the entrepreneur’s actual operational centre. If these elements remain within the Special Economic Zone or at the location covered by the investment support decision, the mere fact that part of the work is performed from home should not automatically negate the exemption.

The pandemic was the beginning of the debate, not its conclusion

The first wave of such questions arose, of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, remote working was a response to extraordinary public health restrictions and the need to ensure business continuity. At that stage, it was relatively straightforward to defend the position that temporarily performing work outside the office did not mean that the business had been relocated outside the zone.

Today, however, we are in a different situation. Remote and hybrid working is no longer exclusively a “COVID-era exception” — it is a permanent feature of work organisation across many service industries. And it is precisely for this reason that it is particularly significant that the more recent interpretive practice has not remained anchored to the pandemic-based argument.

In rulings issued in 2023 and 2024, the Director of the National Revenue Information Office confirmed that remote or hybrid working by employees does not necessarily entail the loss of the right to a tax exemption. In both cases, the emphasis was placed on the fact that, notwithstanding work performed outside the office, the business remained organisationally and operationally embedded within the facility covered by the zone permit.

This is an important indicator. It demonstrates that the physical presence of an employee outside the office is not, in itself, sufficient to conclude that the business has ceased to be conducted within the Special Economic Zone or the Polish Investment Zone.

This approach did not emerge from nowhere

Interestingly, this line of reasoning is not entirely new. Even at an earlier stage, the practice of special economic zones accepted situations in which certain activities functionally connected with zone operations were performed outside the zone area, without the automatic forfeiture of the exemption. This applied, for example, to the use of warehouses located outside the Special Economic Zone or the performance of certain service activities beyond the zone boundaries.

This background is equally relevant to shared services centres. If a more functional approach to the place of business was accepted in the manufacturing context, it is all the more difficult to maintain that, in the services sector, the physical presence of an employee at a specific desk should be the sole determining factor.

What genuinely matters in practice

This does not, of course, mean that anything goes. In cases of this nature, it is insufficient to state: “we have remote working arrangements, so everything is in order.”

In my view, four categories of circumstances are of particular importance here.

First, where the genuine centre of business activity is actually located. Does the location covered by the permit or investment support decision house operational office infrastructure? Is it where process management, meetings, supervision, and organisational and operational activity take place? Does it remain the true centre of the business, or has it become merely a registered address?

Second, whether employees remain organisationally assigned to the facility covered by the support. The fact that someone works from home three or four days a week is not the same as a permanent “detachment” from the facility. What matters is whether the employee can be called into the office, whether they fall within the management structure of that facility, and whether their work is integrated into the processes conducted there.

Third, whether a second, de facto centre of business activity is being established outside the zone. Working from home is one thing; creating a separate operational office outside the Special Economic Zone or the location specified in the investment support decision – from which a material part of the business is genuinely conducted – is quite another. In the latter case, the risk is, of course, considerably greater.

Fourth, whether the model is well documented. Remote working policies, contractual provisions, supervision arrangements, rules governing the use of infrastructure, protocols for calling employees into the office, meeting organisation, and the assignment of employees to the facility – all of these may carry evidential weight. In practice, many cases are not lost on the substantive argument, but on the absence of proper documentary order.

Where the practical risk of abuse arises

And this brings us to the most practically interesting question. Could this approach be exploited by taxpayers who obtain an investment support decision in a location offering a high aid intensity, and then effectively base their operating model on work performed from another city – for example, Warsaw?

In my view, this risk is real. And it is precisely for this reason that these rulings should not be read as endorsing the unlimited “detachment” of business activity from the supported location.

There is a material difference between a situation in which employees work remotely but the business remains genuinely organised at a zone facility or at the facility covered by the investment support decision, and a model in which the supported location is nothing more than a formal registered address while the actual centre of management, operational work, meetings, supervision, and team activity is situated elsewhere.

In the latter scenario, the taxpayer is on considerably more precarious ground. It would be very difficult to convincingly argue that the business is genuinely carried on in the location where the support was formally granted. In other words: the tax authorities accept flexibility in how work is performed, but this should not be taken to mean that they accept a fiction as to the location of the investment.

This distinction is, in my view, fundamental.

Shared services centres operate under a somewhat different logic from manufacturing facilities

This is precisely why the same yardstick should not be applied to shared services centres as to manufacturing operations. In a factory, it is straightforward to say that the product is made on the production floor. In a shared services centre, the output of the team’s work is typically digital, process-based, and dispersed at the execution level – yet it can still be organisationally embedded within a single facility.

The fact that a company has 500 employees but office space for 100 is not, in itself, an argument against the exemption. Today, this is simply a common business model. The real question is not “how many employees fit into the building on any given day,” but rather: where is the facility in which this activity is genuinely organised and conducted?

Conclusion

In my view, employees engaged in a shared services centre may work remotely without automatically risking the loss of the exemption under a Special Economic Zone or the Polish Investment Zone.

This does not mean, however, that every form of remote working will be neutral in its consequences. The boundary is crossed at the point where remote working ceases to be a way of performing duties within the supported facility and begins to result in the de facto transfer of part of the business activity beyond that facility.

In practice, therefore, what matters most is not the label attached to the working model, but the answer to three questions:

• whether the facility covered by the support remains the genuine centre of business activity,
• whether employees remain organisationally connected to it, and
• whether this can be demonstrated coherently in the relevant documentation.

In matters concerning Special Economic Zones and the Polish Investment Zone, it is very often precisely these elements that prove to be decisive.