The adviser who would review your file — what they are qualified in, the memberships you can check, and how to reach them today.
Rule 5 of how we publish: every statutory page on this site carries a reviewer's name and the date it was reviewed, linked to that person's page.
Below: how the practice runs, what clients ask first, two worked files with their numbers, the process end to end, and the published fee.
Rule 5 of how we publish: every statutory page on this site carries a reviewer's name and the date it was reviewed, linked to that person's page. This is that page. Tax content is judged on who wrote it, and it should be.
One question decides the rest of the file. What separates a good outcome here from an ordinary one is rarely the arithmetic. It is knowing that a specific rule exists for author archive per reviewer and being able to evidence that it applies.
I want to know who signs off on the advice I am relying on.
I need someone who has actually filed in both of my countries, not read about it.
I want the person reviewing my file to be reachable.
We hear versions of all three most weeks. The confusion is structural rather than personal: nothing in either system is designed to explain the other. See also keeping a home in Canada while abroad.
Put numbers against it and the shape of the answer is obvious.
Take C$63,000 of income taxed in both countries. Assume the other country charged 23% on it and the home country would charge 44% on the same amount.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Income taxed in both countries | C$63,000 |
| Tax paid abroad (assumed 23%) | C$14,490 |
| Home tax on the same income (assumed 44%) | C$27,720 |
| Credit available (lesser of the two) | C$14,490 |
| Home tax still payable | C$13,230 |
The credit absorbs C$14,490 and leaves C$13,230 payable at home, because the home rate on this income is the higher of the two. The balance is real cash and it is due on the home timetable, which is why instalments get raised in the first meeting. The interesting question is where your own figures fall relative to that, which is a computation rather than an opinion.
An illustration, not a client file. The sums are chosen for legibility and the thresholds are stated for the example alone — nothing reaches a filing until it has been confirmed at source for your own year.
This is what the rule produces when you put figures through it.
Take C$161,000 of income taxed in both countries. Assume the other country charged 27% on it and the home country would charge 41% on the same amount.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Income taxed in both countries | C$161,000 |
| Tax paid abroad (assumed 27%) | C$43,470 |
| Home tax on the same income (assumed 41%) | C$66,010 |
| Credit available (lesser of the two) | C$43,470 |
| Home tax still payable | C$22,540 |
The credit absorbs C$43,470 and leaves C$22,540 payable at home, because the home rate on this income is the higher of the two. The balance is real cash and it is due on the home timetable, which is why instalments get raised in the first meeting. Your version of this table is the useful one, and it takes a short call and a document pack to produce.
An illustration, not a client file. The sums are chosen for legibility and the thresholds are stated for the example alone — nothing reaches a filing until it has been confirmed at source for your own year.
Describe the situation in your own words; translating it into forms is our job.
Read and approved for the 2025 and 2026 filing seasons by Udit Gupta, Cross-Border Tax Expert, Legal Quotient Consultants. General guidance only. Your own facts decide the answer, so bring them to a call before relying on this.
Most readers of this page are looking for international tax accountant. What follows sets out how it works for author archive per reviewer: who is caught by it, what has to be filed, and what the work costs, agreed before it begins.
A reader rang about a sentence that described a filing obligation in general terms without saying which year the treatment applied from. The work was to establish the position for each year the page covered, rewrite the paragraph so the year appeared on the face of it, and then check every other page by the same reviewer for the same habit. Three carried it. All were amended, the review dates moved, and the caller was told what had changed. The archive now shows a cluster of pages reviewed on one day, which is the trace that work leaves.
Legislation repealed a charge that several pages described as current. The work was not simply to delete the passage: readers who had acted while it applied needed the page to record that it had applied and when it stopped. Each affected page was rewritten to state the change and its effective point, the reviewer re-read them against the enacted text rather than the announcement, and the review dates moved. The archive shows which pages were touched and by whom, so nobody has to ask the same question of the site twice.
A sentence describing what the practice could achieve had drifted into a page during an earlier rewrite, and nobody could say where it came from. The work consisted of tracing the claim back, asking the reviewer whose name sat on the page whether they could stand behind it, and finding that they could not. It was removed rather than softened, because a hedged version of an unevidenced claim is still the claim. The page now states only what the engagement produces, and the rule that caught it is applied across the archive.
An estates page carried the name of an adviser whose practice is corporate. Nothing on the page was wrong, which is rather the point: a sign-off states that somebody competent in the subject read it, and that statement was not true here. The work was to identify every page in the same position by comparing the archive against each reviewer's stated practice area, reassign them, and have the new reviewer read each page before their name went on it. Two pages changed substantively in that reading.
A page quoted several thresholds with no citation and no tax year attached to them. The reviewer could not trace them to a published source, and the person who had written them had relied on memory. The work was to check each against the authority's own material, keep the ones that could be confirmed with the year stated beside them, and rewrite the rest as a description of the mechanism with no figure at all. The page reads less precisely and is now correct, and the same test is applied across the archive.
Building the reviewer archive meant listing every statutory page against a name, and one page came back with no name against it at all. It had been published during a site rebuild and had never been read by anyone in a review capacity. The work was to have it read properly, which produced two corrections, and then to make an unassigned page impossible to publish rather than merely unlikely. The archive is itself the check: a page with no reviewer is now visible the moment it appears.
A cross-border return prepared on one side only is usually right in isolation and wrong in combination. The review checks residence, source and relief in that order, and says plainly whether an amendment is worth making.
Read how this one runsResidence is decided on ties, not on a form, and the review asks for evidence of every one of them. The file assembles the ties that were severed and the ones that remained, and answers the questionnaire against the treaty rather than around it.
Read how this one runsAll case studies — every published engagement in one place.
Strategy and compliance for income, assets and families spread across borders.
Firms and partners working across borders meet Regulation 105 withholding, PE risk on long engagements and per-country payroll for travelling staff.
A partnership is taxed in the hands of its partners, so one engagement abroad can reach every partner's personal return. The order matters: the waiver is applied for before the invoice, the presence is tracked before it becomes an establishment, and the payroll is registered before the first day worked in the other country.
On the first call we establish the scope — countries, years, entities, filings — and quote a fixed fee for it in writing. If the scope changes we re-quote before continuing, and nothing is filed until you have approved it.
That is how most of these engagements run. They keep the domestic file, we take the cross-border piece, and the boundary is agreed in writing so nothing is done twice or missed.
Each reviewer has an archive page listing the pages they have checked, with the date each was last reviewed. Start from the reviewer's name at the foot of any statutory page and follow it. The archive is the honest version of an author byline: it shows what a person has taken responsibility for across the whole site, not only on the page you happen to be reading, so you can see whether the reviewer signing off on your subject actually works in it or has signed off on everything indiscriminately.
That a named person read the page against the current rules on that date, and either confirmed it or changed it. It does not mean the page was rewritten, and it does not mean the law changed. It is the narrower claim, which is the only one worth making: somebody checked, and here is when. A date that moved every time an unrelated part of the site was rebuilt would tell you nothing at all, so the date shown is tied to the page's own content rather than to the publication run.
Pages affected by a change are re-checked when it happens rather than on a schedule, and the review date moves to reflect it. Where a provision is repealed or replaced, the page says so rather than quietly deleting the old treatment, because readers who acted on it earlier need to know it applied and no longer does. Where a rule is announced but not yet in force, the page states which is which. If a page carries a rate or threshold with no statement of the tax year it belongs to, treat that as a fault and tell us.
Because a firm cannot answer a question and a person can. Naming the reviewer means there is somebody to put the awkward question to, and somebody whose judgement is visible across every page they have signed. It also disciplines what goes on a page: claims that cannot be evidenced tend not to survive the moment a specific person has to attach their name to them. The reviewer's own page sets out what they work in, so you can judge whether the sign-off is worth anything on your particular subject.
Yes, on the number published on the page. A general question about what a page says is answered as a general question; the moment it turns on your own facts it becomes an engagement, with the scope and the fee written down first. That line is drawn openly rather than discovered later on an invoice. Questions that show a page is unclear are worth more to us than most feedback, and where one leads to a change, the page is amended and its review date moves with it.
Statutory pages are re-read at least once a year, and whenever something in them changes in the meantime, which in practice is the more common trigger. Pages that describe process rather than law are reviewed when the process changes. The archive makes the omissions visible too: a page that has not been looked at for a long time is obvious from the list, which is part of why the list is published rather than kept in an internal spreadsheet.
Missed years are handled as one package, not one at a time, because the route chosen for the first year determines the relief available for the rest. Each country has a disclosure or relief programme with its own conditions, and entering the right one — before the authority contacts you — is usually what keeps penalties down. Filing quietly outside a programme forfeits that protection. See catching up on missed returns.
It depends on the country, and a day count is only ever the start. Many use a threshold in a tax year, some also look at averages across several years, and some have no day test at all and decide on where your home and life are. Two countries can both conclude you are resident, which is what the treaty tie-breaker exists to settle. Counting days without checking the tie-breaker is how people end up filing as resident nowhere. See the residency tie-breaker.
Where our partners studied — CPA Canada (In-Depth Tax Program), AICPA, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and the Malaysian Institute of Accountants.
