What are the biggest lessons from your career so far?
Listen and clarify, don’t assume, and be prepared. As advisors, we are addressing clients’ needs with our recommendations. You don’t go to a client meeting selling solutions non-stop. You should reconfirm the agenda and ask if clients may want to prioritize or just focus on a particular item, or may have a new issue. Sometimes the key decision maker would leave the meeting within the first 15 minutes, and you need to understand the key decision maker’s pain points and concerns and be able to address it in five minutes. It is also important to dive deeper into the clients’ issues. This is how you distinguish yourself from the competition.
What drew you to your tax specialism, and how has the field changed since you started?
As a Hong Kong taxation student, I was interested in various court decisions and how higher courts struck down lower court decisions with deeper analysis of the issues in dispute. When I started practising tax, the news alerts issued by the CPA firms were concise and clients came to us for general advice with a reasonable fee, and a premium fee for complex tax issues. Today, many clients arrive already holding AI-generated commentary and ask us to pressure-test it. I see that as a shift in where our value sits, not an erosion of it: the AI output is a starting point, and clients still ask for the professional judgement, risk assessment and commercial context that sit on top of it.
What are the most common pitfalls you see multinationals run into with cross-border individual income tax compliance?
The common pitfall is a lack of awareness of various tax risks and non-tax risks. Key processes include business and personal travel day tracking, staff cost bearing and recharge, tax domicile, tax residency, minimum visit day threshold under domestic tax law, tax treaty protection conditions, employers’ and employees’ reporting requirements. Related corporate tax risks include permanent establishment impact, immigration and social security exposures. Managing these risks can be as simple as just sending your talent on a business trip, to having a sophisticated talent mobility policy.
What makes designing pre- and post-IPO equity and carried interest plans so complex?
The complexity partly lies on tax efficiency vs. regulatory scrutiny, as well as regulatory restrictions from foreign exchange rules (e.g. in the Chinese Mainland) to listing rule limitation on flexibility of the terms of equity plans. It is critical to balance competing stakeholder interests. The valuation for unlisted share awards, the cost of the equity plan affecting the financial performance for listing purposes, and the restriction on equity plan structure set out by Hong Kong Monetary Authority for a responsible incentive plan for the regulated industries, would require teamwork from the tax, accounting and legal advisors to balance tax efficiency, regulatory scrutiny and guidelines, stakeholder expectation and administrative efficiency.
How has your CPA qualification shaped your approach to tax consulting?
Clients expect your advice to be of quality, professional and legally compliant. The code of conduct of a CPA helps manage client expectations and guide some clients to step away from tax planning that may look attractive but is ultimately unsustainable and towards a mufti-disciplinary approach to navigate the complexities.
