Finished cross-border files, published with what came in, what was filed and what it cost — so you can judge us before you call.
The claims on this site are deliberately few: fixed fees agreed in writing before work starts, 15+ years of cross-border experience, 18,000+ clients served across 4 global offices, a 5.0/5 Google rating, and a helpline that answers 24 hours a day.
Below: how the practice runs, what clients ask first, two worked files with their numbers, the process end to end, and the published fee.
The claims on this site are deliberately few: fixed fees agreed in writing before work starts, 15+ years of cross-border experience, 18,000+ clients served across 4 global offices, a 5.0/5 Google rating, and a helpline that answers 24 hours a day. Anything that cannot be evidenced does not go on a page.
Start with the mechanism, not the form. What separates a good outcome here from an ordinary one is rarely the arithmetic. It is knowing that a specific rule exists for our mission and values and being able to evidence that it applies.
Every firm says the same things — I want to see the actual outcome.
I want to know what a file like mine looked like when it was finished.
I need to see that someone has handled my exact combination of countries.
These are not edge cases. They are what happens when two systems each apply their own logic to one person, and the person is expected to reconcile the result. See also about legal quotient.
Numbers make this concrete, so here is the same rule applied to a set of figures.
Take C$103,000 of income taxed in both countries. Assume the other country charged 27% on it and the home country would charge 36% on the same amount.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Income taxed in both countries | C$103,000 |
| Tax paid abroad (assumed 27%) | C$27,810 |
| Home tax on the same income (assumed 36%) | C$37,080 |
| Credit available (lesser of the two) | C$27,810 |
| Home tax still payable | C$9,270 |
The credit absorbs C$27,810 and leaves C$9,270 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 shape of that result holds; the size of it depends entirely on your own numbers and dates.
These amounts illustrate the mechanism only. The rates and thresholds are assumptions of the example, not your numbers: each is checked against the issuing authority for your specific tax year before any return is filed.
Numbers make this concrete, so here is the same rule applied to a set of figures.
Take C$101,000 of income taxed in both countries. Assume the other country charged 28% on it and the home country would charge 38% on the same amount.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Income taxed in both countries | C$101,000 |
| Tax paid abroad (assumed 28%) | C$28,280 |
| Home tax on the same income (assumed 38%) | C$38,380 |
| Credit available (lesser of the two) | C$28,280 |
| Home tax still payable | C$10,100 |
The credit absorbs C$28,280 and leaves C$10,100 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.
Example figures throughout, selected to make the rule visible, with rates and thresholds assumed for the demonstration. Your actual filing uses figures confirmed with the issuing authority for your tax year.
If that describes your position, the next step is a short call — not a form.
Checked and signed off for the 2025 and 2026 filing seasons by Udit Gupta, International Tax, Cross-Border Tax & Transfer Pricing Expert, Legal Quotient Consultants. Written as general guidance, not as a recommendation for your situation. Talk it through with us before acting on it.
If you came here for international tax accountant, this is where it is dealt with. The subject is our mission and values, and the page covers who it reaches, what then has to be filed, and what we charge to do the work.
Someone rang convinced they had a foreign reporting obligation because a colleague in a similar position had one. The facts turned out to differ in a way that mattered: the account was held in a form that falls outside the test, and the income from it was already on the return. A short conversation established this. No engagement letter was written and no fee was charged, because there was no work to do. What the caller got was a written note of why the rule did not reach them, which is the thing worth keeping if the question is ever raised again.
The client wanted a residency position taken for a run of years and had a clear view of what the answer should be. The documents told a different story: the home, the family and the day-to-day life had all stayed in one country throughout. Taking the position asked for would have meant filing something that would not survive being looked at, so the alternative was set out instead — what the correct treatment was, what it would cost, and what exposure the earlier years carried. The client took that route, with another adviser's second opinion first, which was the right way to decide it.
A file that looked ordinary at the scope stage turned out to need records rebuilt from an institution that was slow to produce them, and the work took considerably longer than the estimate behind the fee. The fee did not move, because the facts had not changed — only our estimate of the effort had, and that is the risk this arrangement puts on us rather than on the client. What was learnt went into the scope questions, so that institution now prompts a different conversation at the start. The engagement produced the filings it promised at the price agreed in writing.
An adviser here reached a conclusion on a corporate cross-border question and the reviewer disagreed. Rather than settle it internally by seniority, the question was put in writing with the facts, the two readings and the material relied on for each, and the file was held. The second reading turned out to be right and the return was built the other way. The engagement produced a correct filing and a written record of the disagreement, which is more useful in the file than a tidy note pretending there had never been a question.
The client's preference was to leave several unreported years alone, on the view that nothing had been asked about them. The advice was the opposite, and the reasoning was put in writing: a disclosure made on your own initiative is treated differently from one produced after a letter arrives, and that difference is not recoverable once the letter has been sent. The client was told plainly that the choice was theirs and that we would document either way. They went ahead. The engagement produced a complete set of filings and the supporting narrative behind them.
Part way through an engagement the client mentioned an entity in a third country that had not come up at the scope stage. It changed the analysis rather than adding to it, and the jurisdiction sat outside what this practice does well. The work already completed was written up in a form another adviser could pick up without repeating it, and the client was pointed toward a firm that files there routinely. Taking the rest of it would have meant learning at the client's expense, which is the thing this page says we do not do.
Withholding on a sale by a non-resident is applied to the sale value rather than to the gain, so it routinely exceeds the tax due. A lower-deduction certificate obtained before completion avoids locking the difference up.
Read how this one runsCanada treats most capital property as sold at fair market value on death, so a terminal return can carry tax on gains nobody realised. Valuations and the order of the returns are what decide the figure.
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.
It covers the work described in the engagement letter, and the letter is written after the scope conversation rather than before it. That order matters. A number quoted before anyone has looked at your documents is a guess that will be revised, which is how clients end up with a bill they did not expect. So the first conversation is about facts: which countries, which years, what has already been filed and what has not. The fee follows from that and is then fixed. If something genuinely new appears — an account nobody mentioned, a year nobody knew was open — it is quoted separately and agreed before any further work is done.
Yes, and it happens often enough to be worth saying. A fair proportion of the people who ring have a straightforward return in one country and a worry that turns out not to reach them. Being told that plainly is a better outcome for everyone than an engagement that produces a filing nobody needed. The judgement we are paid for is which rule governs a situation, and sometimes the honest answer is that no special rule does. That assessment is made in the first conversation, before any engagement letter is written and before any fee is agreed.
Work we would be learning on at a client's expense, and work where the client wants a position the facts will not carry. The first is a matter of scope: a practice built around cross-border files should say so when a question sits outside that, rather than take it and read up. The second is harder, because the client usually believes what they are telling us. If a claimed treatment depends on facts that cannot be evidenced, the file is either rebuilt on facts that can be, or we do not act. A position that collapses when it is looked at costs more than the fee ever saved.
Then the original number stands for the work it described. The scope conversation exists so that the surprises are found before the fee is set, not after, and the cost of missing something in that conversation is ours rather than yours. Where genuinely new facts appear — a second country, a set of years nobody had mentioned, an entity that changes the analysis — that is a separate piece of work with its own written fee, agreed before it is started. What does not happen is an invoice that has grown quietly because the work took longer than we expected.
Because the answer usually depends on facts that were not in the email. Cross-border questions turn on residence, on dates, on what a contract actually says and on what has already been filed elsewhere — and a one-line reply given without those is the sort of advice people act on and later regret. Short questions do get short answers where the answer is genuinely short. Where it is not, we will say what the answer depends on and what would need to be seen. That is a more useful reply than a confident one that turns out to have been about somebody else's situation.
A named person, and you are told who before the work starts. Files here are prepared by one adviser and read by a second before anything is filed, and the second reading is a real one, with the authority to send the file back. Publishing a reviewer's name on a page is the same commitment made in public: it makes the work attributable rather than institutional. If a position we took is challenged, the reasoning behind it is in the file, written at the time, which is what makes it defensible. Advice nobody will put their name to is worth what it costs.
The treaty has a procedure for exactly that. You apply to the competent authority in your residence country, which takes the case up with its counterpart, and the two negotiate a position that removes the double taxation. Some treaties add binding arbitration if they cannot agree. It is slow and it runs on documents, so the practical work is preserving the record and filing protective claims while the clock runs. See our treaty work.
Only up to your own country's tax on that same income, and only for tax you were legally obliged to pay. Two consequences follow. Living somewhere that taxes you more heavily than your residence country does leaves an excess that becomes a carryover rather than a refund. And withholding suffered above the treaty rate is not creditable — the route back to that money is a refund claim in the country that took it. See claiming the credit.
Where our partners studied — CPA Canada (In-Depth Tax Program), AICPA, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and the Malaysian Institute of Accountants.
