IP moved between countries — what part of this actually needs a professional?
Some of it, yes — and we will say so on the call if that is the honest answer. The parts that are worth paying for are the ones where a missed election, a missed deadline or an unverified threshold costs more than the fee: the transfer is priced on the value of the future income the intangible will generate, and the framework asks who developed, enhanced, maintained, protected and exploited it — so legal ownership alone does not decide where the profit belongs.
What if I have already filed and got it wrong?
That is a common starting point. We re-derive the position, identify whether an amendment or a disclosure route is the right vehicle, and tell you which one preserves the relief that is still available. The order matters more than the speed.
How long will it take?
It depends on the documents rather than on us. Once the pack is complete most filings turn around inside a fortnight; anything that needs a certificate from a tax authority runs on that authority's timetable, which we tell you at the start rather than at the end.
Do we pay tax if we move our IP to another company in the group?
Very likely, because for tax purposes the transfer is treated as a sale at value even though no money changes hands and nothing physically moves. The country losing the intangible looks at what it gave up, and the value is measured on the income the intangible is expected to produce in future rather than on what it cost to create. That is why a transfer booked internally at net book value, or at nothing, tends to attract attention: development costs already expensed bear no relationship to what the asset is worth once it is earning.
How is intellectual property valued when it is transferred across a border?
By reference to the future income it is expected to generate, which is why the exercise is a forecasting one rather than an accounting one. The analysis has to identify what exactly is being transferred, what income stream is attached to it, how long that stream is expected to last, and what risks sit against it. Two transfers of apparently similar software can be worth very different amounts depending on the customer base and contracts that travel with them. The assumptions matter more than the arithmetic, so they are the part that gets written down and defended.
Our developers stayed in India, does moving legal ownership change anything?
It changes less than groups expect, and that is the point. The framework asks who develops, enhances, maintains, protects and exploits the intangible, and it allocates the return to those functions rather than to whoever appears on the register. A holding company that owns the rights but performs none of those activities is not entitled to the profit simply because it holds the paper. So if the team, the decisions and the risk all stay where they were, moving the registration produces a transfer to price and very little else, while leaving the earlier position harder to explain.
Is charging a royalty enough, or do we have to transfer the IP itself?
They are different transactions and either can be right, but the one you choose has to match what actually happens in the business. A licence leaves ownership where it is and prices the use of the intangible; a transfer moves the asset and prices the whole future income stream at once. What decides it is usually where the work is genuinely done and who is bearing the risk of the development succeeding. Groups get into difficulty by choosing the legal form first and describing the business afterwards, because the facts are what the analysis is built on.
Who owns the profit from IP our group developed in more than one country?
It is divided by function rather than by title. Where one entity funds the development, another performs it, and a third holds the registration, each is entitled to a return for what it actually contributed and for the risk it actually bore — and an entity that only provides money and does not control how it is spent is usually entitled to less than the group assumes. The practical work is establishing who made the decisions, who employed the people, and who would have carried the loss if the project had failed. That evidence is contemporaneous or it is weak.
We moved our IP years ago and documented nothing, what should we do?
Reconstruct the position before someone asks you to. The information that supports a historic transfer — development records, board papers, employment history, what the asset was earning at the time — becomes harder to assemble every year, and people leave. Establish what was actually transferred and when, value it on the basis that applied then rather than on today's figures, and record the analysis with its gaps stated honestly. Where the current structure does not reflect where the work is really done, that is a separate decision, and it is better taken deliberately than under examination.
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.
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.
