How states verify that you actually live there

Residence requirements — for permits, for permanent status, for naturalisation, and for tax — are enforced with data rather than with interviews. The data comes from ordinary life, and knowing what is looked at is the whole of the compliance.

What is examined

• Entry and exit records. Automated at most borders now, and increasingly comprehensive within travel areas through entry-exit systems.
• Utility consumption. A home with no electricity used is a home nobody lives in, and this is a standard check in tax residence disputes.
• Card and bank activity. Where money is spent, day by day, is the most granular residence evidence that exists.
• Mobile network data, in some jurisdictions and in some kinds of dispute.
• Registrations: tenancy, school enrolment, doctor, vehicle, tax filings.
• Employment and social contribution records.
• Where the family is. The single strongest indicator in a tax residence tie-break, and one nobody can arrange around.

Where verification bites

• Permanent residence and naturalisation applications, where a presence requirement is checked against border records rather than against your account of it.
• Renewals of permits with a minimum presence condition.
• Tax residence disputes, where two countries are each applying their own test to the same facts.
• Applications for a tax residency certificate, which is precisely an assessment of this evidence.

The practical response

Not to manufacture evidence, which is both detectable and an offence, but to let ordinary life generate it and to keep it.

• Keep boarding passes and border stamps, and maintain your own day count.
• Hold the tenancy or the title in your own name, with utilities in it.
• Use the local bank account for local life rather than keeping it dormant.
• Register with a doctor, register the car, enrol the children — the mundane registrations are the evidence.
• Where the family remains elsewhere, understand that this is the fact most likely to defeat a residence claim, and plan on that basis rather than hoping.