What makes physiotherapists & allied health different from an ordinary filing?
Allied health professionals commonly work through a mix of employment, contracting and clinic fee-splits, and each of those three is characterised separately in each country involved. An ordinary preparer applies the general rule and stops there, which is how the relief in the specific provision goes unclaimed.
Can you work with my existing accountant?
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.
Is my clinic fee-split employment income or self-employment income?
It depends on the substance of the arrangement, not the label in the agreement. The questions that decide it are the familiar ones. Who controls the appointment book, who carries the risk of an empty clinic day, who supplies the equipment and the premises, whether you can send a substitute, and whether you can treat patients elsewhere. A fee split can sit on either side of that line. What causes trouble is the same arrangement being characterised one way by the clinic for its own filings and the other way by you on yours, because only one of you can be right.
My clinic calls my percentage rent, is that correct?
Sometimes, and often not. Rent is payment for the use of space, so if you genuinely occupy a room, pay for it whether or not you fill it, and bill your own patients, a rent characterisation can be honest. A percentage of what you collect, with nothing payable in a quiet week, looks much more like a share of the clinic's revenue or a fee for services the clinic provides to you. The distinction matters because it changes who reports the gross income, what expenses each side may claim, and whether indirect taxes apply to the payment.
Why did both countries tax the same months after I moved?
Because each of them assumed you were resident for those months, and neither had been told otherwise. A mid-year move should produce a part-year in the country you left and a part-year in the country you arrived in, meeting at a single date. When no departure return is filed, the first country carries on treating you as resident while the second taxes you from arrival on your worldwide income. The overlap is not a rule of law, it is an unresolved question about a date. Fixing it means establishing when residence actually changed and filing both sides consistently with that.
Do I need to register as self-employed if I also have salaried work?
Usually yes, if any part of your work is genuinely on your own account. The salaried post does not absorb the contract work. They are separate sources, they are reported separately, and the deductions taken from your salary do not cover the tax on the other. Allied health professionals meet this more than most, because the mix is normal in the field: a hospital contract, some sessions at a private clinic, a handful of direct clients. Each has to be characterised on its own terms before any of it can be reported.
How is contract physiotherapy work treated when the clinic is abroad?
The starting point is where you perform the work, because services are generally sourced to the place they are carried out rather than to the payer's address. Treating patients in one country for a clinic registered in another does not usually make the income foreign. What the foreign clinic may do is withhold, or report you to its own authority, which then has to be reconciled with what you declared where you actually worked. Where you do travel to treat, the days spent there matter, and a record kept at the time is worth a great deal afterwards.
Can income be employment in one country and contract in the other?
It can, and it is one of the harder problems in this field. Each country applies its own test to the same facts, and the tests are not identical, so a fee split that is plainly self-employment on one side of a border may be treated as employment on the other. The consequence is practical rather than theoretical, because employment income and business income are relieved under different treaty articles and sourced by different rules, so a mismatch can leave part of the income relieved nowhere. Resolve it in writing before either return is filed.
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 a remittance actually work, and is it taxed?
A remittance is a transfer of money, not a category of income, and moving your own funds between your own accounts is not what creates tax. What can create tax is the income behind the money and the rules of the country it leaves. India, for instance, collects tax at source when a resident individual remits abroad under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, and requires certification before certain payments leave. The transfer is the trigger for paperwork rather than for tax. See the LRS and tax collected at source.
