Cross-border tax for lawyers & in-house counsel — value-priced, fixed fee

Legal professionals abroad frequently hold equity or deferred compensation from a home-country partnership or employer, and deferred amounts are taxed on rules keyed to when the services were performed rather than when the money arrives. An ordinary preparer applies the general rule and stops there, which is how the relief in the specific provision goes unclaimed.

That is how most of these engagements run. They keep the domestic file, we take the cross-border piece, and the boundary is agreed in writing so nothing is done twice or missed.

A secondment usually means your employer keeps paying you from the home office while you work and live in another country, which creates a mismatch between where the income is earned and where it is paid from. We look at whether the secondment changes your tax residency, how any equity awards that vest during the assignment should be split between the two countries, and whether the host country expects a return even though your paycheque never touched a local account.

Partnership income is reported to the partner on an allocation from the firm rather than a straightforward wage slip, and that allocation has to be translated into both countries' tax treatment — one country may tax it as it is earned, the other only as it is distributed. We reconcile the firm's allocation against what each country's return requires and apply the available foreign tax credit so the same income is not taxed in full twice.

No. Vesting and exercise can be taxed at different points depending on the country, so an award that vests while you are resident in one country and is exercised after a move to another can be taxed twice on the same value without careful treaty and credit planning. We track the grant, the vesting schedule, and any change in residency together, then apply the relief the treaty allows rather than letting each country's return be prepared in isolation.

Missed years are handled as one package, not one at a time, because the route chosen for the first year determines the relief available for the rest. Each country has a disclosure or relief programme with its own conditions, and entering the right one — before the authority contacts you — is usually what keeps penalties down. Filing quietly outside a programme forfeits that protection. See catching up on missed returns.

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.