Tax is a business cost that effects cashflow and profit.
Doing business across borders increases the taxes a business has to deal with. This can be at country level. It can also be at regional or municipal level within a country. Taxes include profit based taxes, property taxes, value added and sales taxes, payroll taxes, import and export duty and asset based taxes.
Winter International Tax Services can help your business in a number of ways.
Operational Tax
Tax, in some way, will be part of virtually every business decision you make. It is better to know what its impact will be before make the decision rather than after.
We can act as your in house international tax business accountant, helping you manage your tax cashflow, and minimising its impact on profits. We can work proactively with you to look at issues such as:-
- contracts before signing
- business plans and cash flow models
- the impact of tax on pricing for your goods or services
- tax on sales, whether indirect taxes or withholding taxes
- transfer pricing and its impact
Our aim is to make sure that in your day to day business decisions you maximise profit and minimise adverse cashflow.
Tax Compliance
Dealing with tax compliance across a range of jurisdictions, without the right support, can at best be a time and resource consuming distraction, and at worst a costly nightmare that may even threaten the future of the business as a whole. Tax returns have to be filed, and there are often penalties for failure to file or for incorrect filings, as well as for late paid tax.
We can help you meet those obligations for corporate tax filing and for indirect tax filing in the countries you operate in, by being your in house international tax department. We can:-
- prepare returns for you
- review returns if you prefer to prepare them
- filing returns with local tax authorities
- helping you deal with any queries local tax authorities may have on those returns
- provide you with a single point of contact for all your international tax compliance requirements
We make sure that all filing dates on a global basis are set out and that a clear timetable for gathering necessary information to prepare the return is agreed.
When you decide to set up in a country for the first time, we can help with this. We can make sure that you have support in place to help with local regulations, and that you will be compliant with local tax requirements from day one. We can also help you make sure that the payroll and tax requirements for your staff in that country are met.
Structuring the Business
Winter International Tax Services can help you structure your international commercial operations in a tax efficient manner while also making sure that is compatible with your business objectives.
The choice of location for a business, the registration of companies within a group, and even the type of business entity (company, partnership etc) can all affect tax rates paid, where taxes are paid and whether withholding tax will hit cash flow. Having established the commercial strategy of the business (and its owners), we work with you to ensure that the risk of double taxation is minimised, the overall business structure is as tax efficient as commercially possible, and that the impact of withholding tax on cash flow is minimised.
As tax laws change regularly, we do review existing structures you may have in place to ensure that these continue to meet your needs. This is going to be particularly important as the OECD and EC examine current principles of international taxation. Developments in this area could have a significant tax impact on existing structures.
Transfer pricing
Many regimes have transfer pricing legislation, though the details will differ. Transfer pricing legislation allows revenue authorities to adjust prices for tax purposes on transactions between two businesses under common control. We can help you understand the legislation in the countries in which you operate, and ensure you have proper documentation, appropriate to each jurisdiction, to support your pricing strategies.
Internationally mobile employees
Businesses working across borders will need some of their employees to cross borders, whether for short or long periods. We can help your employees and your business deal with the tax issues that will arise for both as they travel. By taking the stress of tax compliance away, we can help mobile employees to focus their time and energy on the business. In addition we can help those employees plan their affairs tax effectively.
How we have helped some clients
These are some of the ways we have helped clients:
- A UK company had grown over the years from a purely UK based company to having operations in ten countries round the world. We helped the group reorganise to reflect its new business model. The reorganisation included setting up a company to hold the groups IP rights, another to manage the group’s finances and another entity to help provide some cover against commercial risk in the group. Work also included looking at transfer pricing within the group.
- A UK resident but non domiciled individual operated a number of trading businesses round the globe. We helped the individual structure the ownership of those businesses, in part to help protect the family’s wealth.
- A European company wanted to set up a UK subsidiary to trade with the US. We helped set the company up and ensure that its pricing structure was on an arms length basis.
- A UK company wanted to set up operations in Dubai. We helped, through our local contacts to set the company, and advised on UK anti avoidance legislation to be aware of, and what the company needed to do so that it did not fall foul of that anti avoidance legislation.
How Winter International Tax Services can help you
We work with you and your business to understand your commercial needs, and will invest our own time to do that. We develop with you an overall plan for your business and then help implement that. Our aim is to give you proactive, commercial, practical and cost effective advice with clear recommendations. This can save you and your team time and stress. It can cut down tax risk for you as a business and ensure that you as a business do not pay more than your fair share of tax.
We combine our understanding of international markets, culture and business differences round the world, with in depth business and technical knowledge to help you succeed with your international business operations.