A client withheld tax and sent me a slip I cannot use — what now?
The slip is still evidence, even in a format your own revenue authority has never seen. Start with what it actually says: the payer, the period, the gross fee and the amount deducted. Where the form is unreadable at home, the deduction is usually supportable from the remittance advice, the contract and the bank credit read together, and a credit claim is built on that package rather than on the slip alone. The separate question is whether the deduction was right at all. If the work was performed where you live, it may be reclaimable in the client's country instead of credited at home.
Do I pay tax where my client is or where I do the work?
For freelance services the general answer is where you do the work, because that is where the business is carried on. Your client's country may still deduct tax when paying a foreign supplier, which is a collection rule rather than a conclusion about who is entitled to the money. The two are reconciled either by claiming relief in the client's country, using residency evidence, or by crediting the foreign tax at home to the extent it was properly payable there. The order matters, because crediting tax that should never have been deducted leaves the wrong country holding it.
How do I get a residency certificate for a client's payables team?
You apply to the revenue authority where you are resident, and it issues a certificate confirming residence for treaty purposes over a stated period. It is a routine application, but it takes time, and the certificate is dated, so it needs to be in hand before the invoice is paid rather than after. Payables teams often also want a treaty declaration on their own form, naming the article relied on. Supplying both with the invoice is what gets a payment released gross. Chasing it afterwards means a reclaim in a foreign system instead.
I work from a different country every few months — where do I file?
There is no single filing that covers this, so the position is built country by country. Residence in each place turns on its own rules, usually a mix of days present, accommodation and family ties, and short stays often fall short of residence while still creating some source-based obligation. Some countries also treat work physically performed there as taxable from the first day. What makes this manageable is a contemporaneous record: where you were, on which dates, and which fees relate to work done in which place. Reconstructing that later from boarding passes is far worse.
My income is small in each country but large in total — does that matter?
It matters a great deal, and the risk runs opposite to the intuition. Each country's filing thresholds look only at that country's slice, so a freelancer can conclude that nothing is due anywhere. Meanwhile the country of residence taxes the worldwide total, and it is the total that drives the rate, any instalment obligation and often an indirect-tax registration. Nobody having looked at the whole is the common feature of these files. The first piece of work is the consolidation itself: every platform, currency and client in one place, for each year.
Can I stop a client withholding on future invoices?
Often, going forward, though rarely on invoices already paid. The usual route is to give the payer residency evidence and a treaty declaration before payment, so its payables system can release the invoice gross. Some clients will not do it whatever you supply, because their internal policy is to deduct and let the supplier reclaim. That is a commercial position rather than a legal one, and it is worth knowing before you price the work. Where the contract describes the service in a way that attracts the deduction, technical fees or royalties rather than services performed where you are, the wording itself is sometimes the problem.
What is a double tax treaty and what does it actually do?
It is an agreement between two countries that divides up the right to tax. Article by article it decides which country taxes employment income, dividends, interest, royalties, pensions, property and business profits — and where both may tax, it caps what the source country can withhold and tells the other to give credit. It also breaks residence ties and opens a government-to-government channel for disputes. What it never does is apply itself: a treaty position is claimed. See our treaty work.
What is double tax relief and how is it given?
Three mechanisms, and which one you get depends on your residence country's law and the treaty. Exemption leaves the foreign income out of the residence-country base. Credit taxes it and then subtracts the foreign tax, capped at the residence-country tax on that income. Deduction merely reduces taxable income by the foreign tax, and is usually the weakest. Canada and the United States lead with credit; several treaties give exemption for specific income types. See claiming the credit.
