What makes amazon fba sellers different from an ordinary filing?
Fulfilment inventory stored in another country is physical presence, which can create both an indirect-tax registration obligation and a permanent-establishment question for the seller's own company. 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.
Does storing my stock abroad make me taxable there?
Holding goods in a country is physical presence in that country, and it is the fact that starts two separate enquiries. The first is indirect tax: many systems treat holding stock locally as enough to require registration, sometimes from the first sale made out of it. The second is whether your company has a taxable presence for its own profits, which is a different test and is not answered by the registration. The two get confused because one warehouse triggers both. They have different answers, different thresholds and different filings, and each has to be worked through separately.
Do I still need to register if the marketplace collects tax?
Frequently yes. Where a marketplace is made responsible for collecting tax on the sales it facilitates, that relieves you of collecting on those particular sales. It does not necessarily relieve you of registering, of filing, or of accounting for anything the marketplace did not cover: sales made through your own channels, movements of stock between countries, or imports you made yourself. Sellers who read the collection as meaning it is all handled tend to find out otherwise when an obligation is assessed from the date the stock first arrived, rather than from the date they noticed.
I incorporated at home but sell abroad, where do I file?
Probably in both places, for different things. Your company remains within its home system for its worldwide profits, and its home filings continue as before. Separately, each country where you hold stock or make supplies may require its own registration and returns, and one of them may also raise the question of whether the profits themselves are partly taxable there. Those are three distinct obligations. The work worth doing first is a map: where the stock actually is, what that creates in each place, and what has already been collected on your behalf, before anything is filed anywhere.
How do I find out which countries my stock is in?
From your own seller reports rather than from memory. The fulfilment programmes you have opted into determine where inventory can be placed, and the movement reports show where it actually went and when. Those dates matter, because a registration obligation is usually assessed from the date stock first arrived in a country, not from when sales there reached some level. We ask for the inventory and movement reports, the programme settings, and the transaction reports, and build the map from those. Sellers are often in one or two more countries than they expected, and occasionally in fewer.
Which seller reports do you need to prepare my filings?
The ones that show movement and the ones that show sales. In practice that means the inventory and cross-border movement reports, the transaction-level sales reports showing the departure and destination of each order, records of what the marketplace collected and remitted, and your import documents where you imported stock yourself. Bank statements will not do it, because a payout is a net figure that hides the detail each return needs. Once the reports are identified we tell you which to pull each period, so the process repeats. Documents are exchanged on secure cloud software.
Can I stop my stock being sent to other countries?
Usually, through the fulfilment settings, and it is a legitimate way to control where obligations arise. Turning off cross-border placement narrows where you have presence, at the cost of the delivery speeds those programmes exist to provide. It is a commercial decision informed by a tax one, which is the right order to take them in. What it does not do is undo the past. Stock that was in a country created whatever obligations it created while it was there, and switching a setting off today leaves those to be dealt with separately.
How does the treaty tie-breaker work when both countries say I am resident?
As a sequence, stopping at the first test that gives an answer: where you have a permanent home available; if in both or neither, where your centre of vital interests is; then habitual abode; then nationality; and if all of those tie, the two tax authorities decide by agreement. It is evidential rather than elective — you do not choose your treaty residence, you demonstrate it, which makes the record of homes, family and time the substance of the claim. See tie-breaking dual residency.
Is "fund transfer pricing" the same thing as transfer pricing?
No — and if you came here to calculate FTP, this is not it. Fund transfer pricing is a bank's internal allocation of funding costs and benefits between its own business units, a treasury and asset-liability management discipline used to measure branch or product profitability. Tax transfer pricing is about prices between legally separate related parties across borders, and about which country taxes the resulting profit. The words overlap; the fields do not. See our transfer pricing work.
