KPMG’s International Executive Services professionals can assist with all matters related to your international expatriates and business travellers, regardless of your assignment destinations or origins. Working together, we can help you review your current programs, introduce tax approaches to address the issues facing your business, and give you straightforward answers on the implications.
Specifically, our professionals can help add value to your organization with the following services:
Taxation of International Executives
KPMG has issued a thought leadership piece on the Taxation of International Executives. This piece provides executives who are continuously travelling with a developed tool to guide them through their taxation process. It also equips Human Resource professionals with the information they need in order to provide educated and insightful solutions.
You should manage your international work force with a view to meeting strategic business goals. Working with KPMG, you can draw on a wide range of services—from tax and payroll consulting, to global mobility services—that can help you meet your international assignment program objectives, effectively manage your assignees, and fulfill employees’ international human resources needs.
When an employee is sent to work in another jurisdiction there is frequently a payroll tax withholding and reporting obligation in the host jurisdiction. If the employee remains on home country payroll, there may be a reporting and withholding obligation in both jurisdictions. Failure to properly report and withhold could result in penalties assessed to both the employer and employee.
KPMG can help a company establish a “shadow payroll” to report compensation in the host country, even if paid from the home country payroll. In addition, KPMG can assist with obtaining certificates of coverage to help reduce social security taxes, and obtaining waivers to help reduce home country withholding. Properly complying with international payroll reporting and withholding requirements can help a company ensure good corporate standing, avoid unrecorded liabilities, and promote operational efficiencies.
Equity and deferred compensation may be subject to different tax rules, depending upon the location of residence or services when granted, vested, or received. The challenge is to ensure you and your employees manage taxes while meeting payroll reporting and withholding requirements. KPMG can assist with technology tools to help ensure that such compensation is tracked and reported in the appropriate jurisdiction, and to avoid double withholding taxes. Proper tax planning can help reduce corporate deductibility, in order to further reduce costs.
In order to build, manage, and preserve wealth on a multinational basis, it can be necessary to consider a person’s global income and wealth taxes. Estate taxes can erode a significant portion of a family’s wealth. When a wealthy person lives in a foreign jurisdiction or has beneficiaries outside his home country, income and wealth taxes can be quite complex.
KPMG’s Global Wealth Services team works with high net worth executives and individuals to help ensure that global income and estate taxation can be reduced. Frequently, a properly drafted will or implementation of a trust structure can help reduce taxation while providing comfort to executives that their estate planning has been designed to meet their financial goals.
Recognizing the pressures you face on your time and resources, KPMG developed KPMG LINK™, a secure, user-friendly Web-based tool that provides guidance on planning, budgeting, tracking, and reporting assignment costs. KPMG LINK assists worldwide payroll compliance by identifying country-specific equity compensation tax withholding and reporting requirements.
The Cost Projection Manager module performs “what if” calculations so you can structure effective compensation packages and evaluate the effect of policy changes on assignment costs. It can also be used for budgeting, hypothetical tax, and tax planning projections. The Cost Projection Manager includes tax laws for more than 50 countries.
With the Assignment Data Manager and Compensation Process Manager modules, you can maintain up-to-date assignee data, prepare compensation reports and assignment letters, and process and report on non-payroll compensation items.
Through these modules, KPMG LINK can assist you with:
- Tax compliance management
- Compensation collections
- Cost projection/financial modelling
- International assignment program management.