Audit & Riskmanagement
Audit & Riskmanagement
“While companies are able to manage the administration of HR processes for locally employed and locally active employees without any difficulty, expatriates and ‘international commuters’ constantly constitute a challenge."
There is often a lack of expertise in companies because due to the low number of internationally active employees relative to locally active employees, the necessary know-how cannot be consolidated to a sufficient extent and constantly maintained in the company due to reasons of efficiency and cost.
Hence, CONVINUS increasingly assists companies with the risk assessment of their international assignments. In this case, the relevant international assignment circumstances are usually evaluated with regard to tax, social security, and labor law risks. In a second step, we work with the company to determine which risks can and/or should be eliminated, and how the processes can be optimized for future international assignments.
Furthermore, we are seeing an increase in audit requirements for payroll accounting for expatriates and internationally active employees. One particular difficulty here is the correct representation of the contractually agreed remuneration on the payroll and the legally compliant handling of remuneration components with regard to social security as well as domestic and international taxes.
Our experience shows that an early audit avoids a large number of other difficulties and follow-up costs related to international assignments. When payroll accounting, social security, and taxation issues are correctly approached at the beginning of the posting, or corrected in a timely fashion, the administrative costs related to the overseas deployment of employees can be significantly reduced.
Contact us today for your audit of expatriate and payroll aspects so that risks can be recognized and minimized.
Our key consulting services:
- Compliance checks on existing global mobility cases with regard to income taxes, social security, labor law, and payroll
- Review of contract templates for postings
- Comparison of payroll with contractual terms agreed upon and adaptation of payroll
- Reversal of salary payments for incorrect payouts and the incorrect representation of salary components
- Verification of correct social security coverage for employees with international activities
Audit of payroll accounting for international employees
Due to an AHV (Old-Age and Survivors' Insurance) revision, it came to light that the payroll accounting for employees working abroad was partially incorrect. Due to the number of employees involved and the sums that the AHV was demanding as back payment, we audited the payroll accounting for the past three years, including the tax-related and social security situation. At the same time, work and residence permit-related aspects were also examined and were also corrected.
BEST PRACTICES - A small selection of cases from our day-to-day work:
- Risk evaluation with regard to the erroneous payment of social security contributions in Swiss companies
- Correction of payroll accounting for employees posted to France
- Rectification of social security coverage for German cross-border commuters
- Contract termination for “improperly” posted employees from Germany to China and Taiwan to avoid difficulties due to labor laws
- Correction of tax payments and of withholding taxes for employments in Switzerland and abroad
