In today’s business world, top executives need to be able to travel and work in many different countries and jurisdictions. Their compliance needs may therefore be quite complex, with factors like increased confidentiality, adapting to last minute changes in travel schedules, and their own personal, industry-specific regulatory requirements coming into play.

Our client is a major semiconductor manufacturer with more than 45,000 employees worldwide. It faced the challenge of ensuring consistent multi-jurisdictional tax compliance for its C-suite executives and corporate vice presidents. High standards of confidentiality were required, especially for payroll data, so that access to sensitive information would be restricted.

Our approach involved careful co-ordination of client service teams in all countries where the C-suite executives needed to be compliant. Our team in Switzerland worked with our practitioners in France, Italy, Germany, Singapore and Japan to develop an easy-to-use mobility management model. We gathered further expertise from external payroll specialists to help implement and operate the new system.

The resulting model we developed, compared with our client’s previous model, has saved several million Swiss francs in tax and social security charges. It also provided protection over accumulated pension benefits, and ensured that these benefits could be distributed in a compliant and tax-efficient way. In addition to the savings, our compliance model guarantied confidentiality and provided user-friendly dashboard reporting for budgeting for the future.

Many Swiss-based companies with global ambitions seek to expand their business operations into new markets worldwide, especially countries with fast-growing economies. They will usually need to re-locate staff, from head office or around the world, to establish operations from scratch and get business going. Re-located staff may need to remain in place for several years. Taxation can be a major concern when companies enter a new market, and they will want operate in the most cost-efficient way. Therefore, before they decide where to operate, they need to be aware of all the possible implications.

Our client was looking to expand its business into five South-East Asian countries, but to locate all newly deployed staff in just one of them. They would then make regular business trips from the base country to the other four locations. The client considered cost-efficiency as a high priority. Our role was to identify which country would be the most cost-efficient base, with business travel arrangements that would provide the most tax-efficient structure for the new operations.

Our Swiss practitioners worked with Deloitte teams in each of the five countries to devise a structure that would limit exposure to taxation. We conducted extensive research and identified a location in which taxation could be avoided entirely for the first six months, along with a business travel plan that would minimise further tax costs. Using our extensive network and unparalleled expertise, we were able to provide extensive advice relating to all five countries within just three days. Our Global Mobility team was able to recommend a tailored solution that would enable our client to achieve its business objectives, and at the same time meet all compliance requirements and minimise costs. The client has implemented our recommendations, and the relocated executives are now living in South East Asia and travelling within the region, helping to establish a business presence there.