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.
Which country actually taxes my Amazon profits if my stock is abroad?
Two questions sit behind that one and they have different answers. Sales tax follows where the goods are and where the customer is, and storing stock in a country is normally enough to bring you into its indirect tax system whether or not you have ever been there. Tax on the company's profits follows a different test, about whether the business has a taxable presence in that country. A warehouse holding your own goods can be relevant to that test as well, which is why the two questions are looked at together rather than one at a time.
The marketplace collects tax for me, so do I still owe anything?
Usually yes, and often in more than one place. Where the marketplace is responsible for collecting on a sale, that covers the sale. It does not cover your registration, your returns, or sales made off the platform, and it does not touch the company's own profits, which are taxed under a separate set of rules. What we see most often is a seller whose marketplace-collected sales are in order, and whose stock movements between countries, which the marketplace does not collect on, have never been reported anywhere.
Do I owe tax in a country I have never set foot in?
Physical presence is about your goods as much as about you. Inventory sitting in a fulfilment centre is in that country, being stored, insured and dispatched there, and most systems treat that as presence regardless of where the owner lives. So the answer is often yes, and the trigger is the arrival of the stock rather than any visit by you. It is worth knowing which countries the marketplace is entitled to move your goods into, because that decision is frequently made by the platform and not by the seller.
I incorporated at home but sell almost entirely abroad, where do I file?
At home, and possibly elsewhere as well. A company is normally taxable in the country it is resident in on its worldwide profits, so the home filing does not disappear because the customers are foreign. What the foreign activity can add is a second obligation, where the business has enough presence in that country for it to tax the profits attributable there. Relief for being taxed twice on the same profit is then claimed, usually under a treaty. The order matters: establish where you are taxable first, then claim the relief.
How do I find out what tax was already deducted from my payouts?
From the marketplace's own reports rather than from the bank. A payout is a net figure with several layers taken out of it: platform fees, refunds, advertising, and in some cases tax collected or withheld before you were paid. The settlement report breaks those apart. Until that is done a seller cannot say what was collected on their behalf, and neither can we. Reconciling the reports to the bank deposits is the first thing we do on this kind of file, because everything else depends on knowing what has been paid and by whom.
If two countries both tax the same sale, do I pay twice?
Not usually, but relief has to be claimed rather than applied automatically. Where two countries have a claim on the same profit, the treaty between them and each country's own domestic rules decide which gives way and by how much. The relief is claimed on a return, with the foreign tax evidenced. Sellers who file in one country and leave the other for a later year often find the relief is no longer available, because the window for claiming it has closed. It is usually better to prepare the two filings together than to leave one of them a year behind.
How would a foreign tax authority know I am resident there?
Mostly from information you or your bank already provided. Account-opening forms ask you to self-certify tax residence, and that certification is reported between authorities under the Common Reporting Standard or, for US accounts, under the FATCA framework. Beyond that: employer and payroll filings, property registries, immigration records and the tax filings of anyone who paid you. The realistic planning assumption is that the data arrives. See FATCA and information reporting.
Do NRIs pay tax on money sent to India?
Sending your own funds to India is a transfer of capital, not income, so the remittance itself is not taxed. What is taxable is income the money then earns in India — interest, rent, capital gains — under the rules for the account type it sits in. Sending money out of India is the direction that needs certification before the bank will act. See NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts.
