Can a non-resident appeal an Indian assessment order?
Yes. The first appeal against an assessment is open to the taxpayer the order is made against, and being resident elsewhere does not change that. What does change is what the appeal is for. For a non-resident, the first appeal is usually the first occasion on which the treaty position is properly set out with evidence behind it, because the assessment has typically been made without it. That makes the appeal record worth building carefully: it is the document a later forum reads, and a thin one narrows what can be argued afterwards.
Do I appeal the assessment or the penalty order separately?
The appeal is against an order, so start by identifying which orders exist. An assessment, a reassessment and a penalty order are separate orders with their own dates, and each has to be appealed in its own right, even where the penalty follows directly from the assessment. Taxpayers often discover a penalty order only when collection starts, by which time the assessment appeal has been running for months. Listing every order received, with its date, before deciding what to file is dull work that prevents the common and irreparable mistake here, which is appealing one order and letting another go final.
I never received the order, how do I know my deadline?
The clock runs from the order, so the first factual question is what order exists and when it reached whom. For a non-resident that is rarely obvious. The order may have gone to an old address, to a director who has left, or to an Indian adviser who no longer acts. Before framing any appeal we establish the order and the date of service from the records on both sides, because everything else, including whether you are in time and what you say if you are not, depends on that date. Assuming it is the date printed on the order is how people end up arguing a point they did not need to argue.
Should the appeal be filed by me or my Indian company?
By whoever is named in the order. An assessment made on an Indian company is the company's appeal, even where the economic consequence falls on a foreign shareholder, and an order made on a non-resident personally is theirs. This matters more than it sounds, because the wrong appellant is a defect that can consume the deadline while it is being sorted out. Where both a company and its shareholder have orders arising from the same transaction, the appeals are separate but the grounds need to be written together, so that they do not contradict each other.
Why does the treaty position have to go in at the first appeal?
Because the first appeal is where the record is made. The grounds and the evidence filed there are what a later forum reads, and adding a position afterwards means explaining why it was not raised when it could have been. For a non-resident the treaty analysis is usually the heart of the case, covering residence, the nature of the income and which country has the right to tax it, and it needs documents rather than assertion: residence certification, contracts, evidence of where the work was done. Building that at the first stage is the difference between a record that supports the argument and one that merely contains it.
Can we add grounds later if we file the appeal now?
Plan on the basis that you cannot. The grounds are framed at filing and that framing shapes everything after it, so the sequence we work in is to settle the facts and the position first and file second, even when the deadline makes that uncomfortable. A holding appeal filed to stop the clock, with grounds written in an afternoon, is a document that then has to be lived with. Where time is genuinely short, the better use of it is to get the substantive grounds right on the points that matter and keep the rest tightly drawn.
Do Canada and the United States share tax information?
Yes, through more than one channel. The treaty has an exchange-of-information article that supports both routine and on-request exchange. Separately, an intergovernmental agreement has Canadian financial institutions identify US-reportable accounts and report them to the CRA, which passes them to the IRS, with the reverse flow for Canadian residents. Most other country pairs use the Common Reporting Standard for the same purpose. See FATCA reporting.
What is double taxation?
Double taxation means the same income being taxed by two authorities. It comes in two forms: juridical, where two countries each tax one person on one amount, and economic, where two different people are taxed on the same underlying profit — a company on its earnings and a shareholder on the dividend paid out of them. Relief comes from a treaty, a foreign tax credit, or an exemption, and which one applies depends on the income type. How to avoid double taxation sets out the routes.
