Do I need to come to your office?
No, though you are welcome to: we have offices in India, the USA, Canada and the UAE. Documents move through a secure portal, and meetings can be in person or by video, arranged around your time zone. Clients in the Gulf, India, Europe and across North America all work with us the same way.
Does it matter which of your offices handles my file?
No. The same named reviewer signs off, the same authorisation is filed with the tax authorities, and the same fixed fee is agreed in writing before any work starts.
Why can't I just email you my tax documents?
You can send us anything, but a tax file assembled out of email attachments is hard to keep straight and hard to keep private. Attachments scatter across threads, versions multiply, and a single mistyped address sends a slip carrying your identifiers to a stranger. The portal holds each document in one place with a record of who put it there and when, which matters later if a tax authority asks what supported a particular figure. Nothing in your file sits in an inbox, and nothing has to be forwarded between the people working on it.
I don't have a scanner, can I just photograph my documents?
Yes. Photographs taken on a phone are fine for most documents, provided the whole page is in frame and the text is legible. What tends to cause a second request is a cropped edge, a slip photographed at an angle so the figures blur, or a multi-page statement where only the summary page was captured. If a document cannot be read we say so at the point it is uploaded rather than at the end of the work. Original paper is almost never needed, because filings are authorised electronically.
Who can see my documents once I have uploaded them?
Access is granted to the people working on your engagement and to nobody else, and it is granted file by file rather than as a shared drive anyone can browse. That is the reason for the portal in the first place. Tax documents carry identifiers, bank details, employment history and often family circumstances, which makes them the most sensitive records most people own. If you ask, we can tell you which documents are held on your file and who has had access to them.
Do I need to post or courier anything to sign?
In the ordinary case, no. Authorisations and engagement documents are signed electronically, and returns are transmitted to the tax authorities once you have approved them. A small number of situations still call for wet ink or a certified paper original, including some estate and probate matters and some foreign authorities that will accept nothing else. Where your file is one of those, we tell you at the outset rather than letting it surface at the end when the work is otherwise finished.
What happens to my documents after the return has been filed?
They stay in your file, because the reason to keep them is what happens afterwards. A query from a tax authority can arrive well after a return has been assessed, and answering it means producing the document that supported a particular figure. Keeping the file intact means that can be done from the record rather than by asking you to find the paper again. You keep access to your own documents, and the engagement sets out what is retained and for how long.
My spouse and I file together, do we need separate accounts?
Usually each person has their own access and the household work is linked behind it, because the two of you may not want identical visibility and a later separation should not mean untangling one shared login. Documents belonging to both of you, such as a joint account statement or a property record, are filed once and referenced from either side rather than duplicated. If you would rather one of you handled everything, that can be arranged, but it is a choice made deliberately at the start rather than by default.
What happens if the two countries disagree about which of them can tax me?
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.
How do you avoid double taxation?
You claim relief once, in the right country, in the right order. Usually the source country taxes first, the residence country then gives a credit for that tax against its own charge on the same income, and a treaty caps the source-country rate. Getting the order wrong is what produces a double charge you then have to unwind. The mechanism differs by income type, which is why we map the whole position before filing either return. See how to avoid double taxation.
