March 24, 2020

Learn More About How We Can Help During the COVID-19 Outbreak

We hope you are well and that you are managing to keep yourselves, your families and your employees safe at this time of uncertainty with the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. 

As your Global Mobility partner, we are only a phone call or email away to walk through scenarios with you and create solutions to the evolving situations that are arising; solutions that prioritize the well-being of your employees while making good business decisions to minimize the financial impact on your company. Situations that may need to be addressed include:

1. Assignments being postponed.
2. Employees are repatriating early.
3. Business travel slow-down.
4. Employees working from home, in different tax jurisdictions from where they are paid.
5. Employees being displaced and not able to return to their home base.

 As your Global Mobility partner, we are here to help you think through these situations in detail.  Here are some things you can do now:

1. Ensure you have a full accounting of all your assignees and their family members.  Know all nationalities.
2. Ensure you have updated contact information so you can reach out to them quickly regarding tax, immigration, travel and tax advice.
3. Understand the entrance and exit rules for each country (i.e. country by country travel bans) as they are all different and change daily.
4. Work with immigration to understand new visa rules.
5. Tax and Immigration – Know each employee’s trigger days – if an employee returns early or delays departure, this may cause unexpected tax or immigration issues 
6. Have an intranet that enables employees to know what the company’s policy is.  Your employees will have a lot of questions.

 We expect in the near term that companies will reduce initiations and increase repatriations.  Business travel has already decreased markedly. 

In the longer term, we will find companies will focus on reducing costs (due to financial impacts) and there may be a big push for lump-sum payments or core-flex programs.  Housing, shipping, education and travel are expensive items.  While these are likely measures that will not last forever, we can help you restructure. 

Our tagline Serving People, Personally has never been more important to us as we work to make your responsibilities easier.   

Lastly, here are Global Mobility Tax, fortunately we have not been directly affected by COVID-19 at this time.  We have deployed and implemented our contingency operation plans, including Work-from-Home, Technology & Data Safety Procedures, and Restricted Travel policies.  Global Mobility Tax is committed to protecting our employees’ health and safety and continued, and uninterrupted service for our clients.