There are more than 200 countries in the world, each with unique cultures, languages and histories. However you should assume one thing for certain when you expand into any of them. Each of them will have a local tax authority waiting to scrutinize your new business and ensure that you pay all your taxes due. In most countries you’ll also face requirements to file local financial statutory accounts using local accounting rules (GAAP) and local prescribed formats.

It can be complex, costly and time-consuming to comply with all these international tax and accounting regulations. It can also be hard to find good, plain-speaking advice to help you navigate through this maze when you expand overseas. In this article I will highlight common linkages between tax and accounting based on my experience in over 25 countries across EMEA, APAC and the Americas. I will also give some practical tips on how to manage tax and accounting to save you money and time wherever you expand overseas.

To set the scene, it is useful to remember why tax and accounting are fundamentally linked. Taxes are designed to generate revenue for countries in line with local regulations. Accounts are required to ensure that these revenues are calculated correctly, again in line with local regulations. Think of it in reverse. Can you imagine how much tax would be paid if corporations could file tax returns based on profits calculated using their own self-made accounting rules?

This explains why local accounts form the basis of Corporate and Income (CIT) tax returns in each country. Companies can use these principles to create international statutory accounts and tax returns from their regular management accounts. This process can be replicated for more than one country, making an efficient global or regional shared service model possible.

The links between tax and accounting are also evident in some other key areas:

Planning

The deadlines for filing accounts and tax returns and paying taxes differ widely between countries, though they are generally less tight than the US. For example in many EMEA countries accounts can be filed 12 months after the end of the Period. Tax returns are due after the accounts, so the tax team should schedule their work to start only after the accounts are finalized.

Legal entities

Legal entities play a critical in international tax and accounting. The legal entity is the ultimate corporate body legally responsible for making contracts and commitments. Its directors carry heavy legal responsibilities, for example, in Brazil a legal entity director can be liable for the debts of an insolvent company. There are strict rules to ensure that tax and accounting is correct at the level of each legal entity, even if there are more than 1 in each country or there is grouping of profits and losses between legal entities.

This is relevant for our article because the legal entity is the basis for both accounting and tax returns. Important tax items, like transfer pricing agreements, will need to be signed by the legal entity and reflected in the accounts as well as the tax return. If such legal agreements are not baked into the routine management accounting structure, e.g. inter-company transfer pricing recharges, they will need to be manually inserted at year end for the statutory accounts.

Data

As much of the data needed for the tax return comes from accounting, many parts of the tax return can be taken straight from the accounts without adjustment. Therefore data should be automatically interfaced between accounting and tax wherever possible.

Resourcing

The close links between tax and accounting explain why there is no golden rule in my experience for how to resource each item. Sometimes the two areas are handled by separate teams, sometimes they are performed by the same people. If you are outsourcing your finances internationally and if your business is not huge in terms of numbers and complexity, then in my experience it usually makes life easier and cheaper to have one outsourcing supplier handling both tax and accounting.

If you have a separate payroll supplier, you need to watch for cross over between employee and CIT tax issues. In Spain for example, the same withholding tax return can include both employee and contractor taxes. If you outsource, the employee taxes will be provided by the Payroll supplier, while contractor taxes will be sourced by your accounting supplier.

I hope this article has helped clarify how you can manage international tax and accounting. While I have focused on Corporate & Income Taxes (CIT), there are many other elements to international tax. Obligations such as property taxes, withholding taxes, employee taxes and VAT/Sales Tax all require separate approaches as they have different data sources and filing structures.

John Galvin is a Blue Marble Global Consultant residing in the UK.