Half my school package is benefits, which parts are taxable?
Take the package apart before you take a view. Accommodation, utilities, flights, tuition for dependants, medical cover and an end-of-contract gratuity are each characterised separately, and a benefit that is exempt where the school sits may be ordinary income where you remain resident. The pattern worth knowing is that school payroll systems are built for the majority of staff and apply one treatment to everyone. If your circumstances differ from the majority, in nationality, residence or immigration status, that default is unlikely to be your answer.
Does my school being a non-profit change my own tax position?
It can, which is why the question is worth asking rather than assuming either way. Some treaties and domestic rules contain exemption articles that attach to the employer status, such as a non-profit body, a cultural institute or an entity linked to a foreign government, and those articles can relieve remuneration that would otherwise be taxable where the work is done. The relief follows the employer, not the individual, so two colleagues doing the same job for differently constituted employers can be taxed differently. Establish what the entity actually is before reading the article.
My school withholds local tax, why does home still want a return?
Because withholding abroad and a filing obligation at home are unrelated questions. If you remained resident at home, that country generally taxes your worldwide income and expects the return whether or not tax has already been taken elsewhere. What the foreign withholding gives you is a credit to claim against the home liability, and claiming it requires the return you were not going to file. Treating the local deduction as the end of the matter is the most common reason school staff arrive with several unfiled years behind them.
Did renewing my contract end my treaty exemption?
Very possibly, because most of these articles are limited by time rather than by contract. A period expressed in years of presence keeps running through a renewal, so the exemption can lapse in the middle of a term while your payslip carries on unchanged. Two consequences follow. The income becomes taxable where the work is done from the date of expiry, and the year in which that happens has to be split. Check the expiry against your arrival date, not against the start of the current contract.
Are my children school fees taxable if the school waives them?
A waived or discounted place has a value, and whether that value is taxable income to you depends on the rules of each country with a claim on your earnings. Some systems tax benefits in kind on cost, some on a notional or market value, and some exempt a benefit provided to all staff on the same terms. The amount that ends up on a return can therefore differ between the two countries for the same waiver. Ask the school what value it has reported and to whom it reported it.
Do I have to file where my school payroll sits?
Sometimes, and it is a third question alongside where you live and where you work. International schools are often administered from one country, operate in a second and employ staff resident in a third, and a payroll location can create a reporting obligation of its own. Rather than assume, list the countries involved, establish what each one asserts over your income, and settle the order in which relief is claimed. Getting that order wrong is what produces double tax a treaty should have prevented.
What is cross-border tax?
Cross-border tax is what applies when income, assets or people touch more than one tax system at once — someone living in one country and earning in another, a company selling or hiring abroad, a family holding property in a second country. The work is rarely one country's rules applied harder; it is reconciling two sets of rules and claiming the relief that stops the same income being taxed twice at full rates. See what we do.
Is moving money between my own accounts in two countries taxable?
Moving your own capital between your own accounts is not itself income, so the transfer is not what creates tax. What can create tax or reporting is the income the money earned before it moved, a foreign-exchange gain on certain holdings, and the reporting obligations the balances themselves trigger — foreign account and asset reports keyed to balances rather than income. Remittances out of some countries also need certification before the bank will send them. See foreign account reporting.
