What is FC-GPR and who has to file it?
It is the Indian report of shares issued to a foreign investor, and it is the company issuing the shares that files it, not the investor. The trigger is the issue itself rather than the receipt of money, and the report is due within days of the transaction. It sits on the exchange-control side rather than the tax side, which is why satisfying the tax position on a round tells you nothing about whether this obligation has been met. Companies that raise from abroad usually discover it either at the bank or in an investor's diligence questionnaire.
I missed the FC-GPR deadline after issuing shares, what happens now?
Late reporting is not fatal, but it does not cure itself either. The route is compounding, which is a formal application acknowledging the delay and settling it, rather than simply filing late and hoping the gap is not noticed. The longer it sits the more awkward it becomes, both because the delay compounds and because an unreported issue is exactly what the next investor's advisers will look for. The practical order of work is to establish the true date of the issue from the company's own records, make the report, and then deal with the delay on its own terms rather than disguising it.
Does FC-GPR apply if the foreign investor is my own overseas company?
The report follows the shares, not the relationship. Shares issued to an entity outside India are reported whether that entity is an unconnected fund or a holding company the same founders own. Group reorganisations are where this is most often missed, because internally they feel like moving something from one pocket to another, and there is no external investor present to ask for the paperwork. The company issuing the shares still files. If a structure has been built in stages over several years, check each step rather than assuming the most recent one is the only one that mattered.
Why is my bank refusing to certify the FC-GPR?
Usually because something in the file does not reconcile. The money that arrived, the shares recorded as issued and the dates on the board approvals have to tell one story, and a bank will hold the transaction until they do. Common causes are funds received in tranches against a single allotment, a remittance described in terms that do not match the subscription, or a price the valuation does not support. The fix is documentary rather than argumentative: put the sequence in order, evidence each step, and hand the bank a file it can follow from the remittance through to the entry in the register.
Do I file FC-GPR when the money came in before the shares were issued?
Money arriving and shares being issued are two separate events, and the report attaches to the issue. That distinction matters when funds sit in the account for a period before allotment, because the clock everyone worries about runs from the transaction the report describes. Where there has been a gap, the file should be able to explain what the money was while it waited, and when the allotment was actually approved. Boards sometimes date a resolution to suit the paperwork. The register, the bank statement and the minutes should agree without anyone having to be persuaded.
Is FC-GPR a tax filing or something else?
It is not a tax filing. It belongs to the exchange-control layer that runs alongside the Indian tax system, and the two define things differently and govern different questions. A round can be entirely clean for tax and still be unreported here, and it is the second failure that stops money moving, because a bank will not process a later transfer while an earlier issue is outstanding. Treat them as two separate checklists over the same transaction. Advisers who look at only one of them tend to hand back a file that survives an assessment and fails at the counter.
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.
How does cross-border tax planning work?
It starts with facts rather than structures: which countries have a claim on you, what each one taxes, and where the two overlap. From there the decisions are about order and timing — which country taxes first, where relief is claimed, and whether a filing or a certificate has to be in place before money moves rather than after. Most of the value is in the sequencing, because relief claimed late is usually relief recovered slowly. See international tax planning.
