We work alongside companies on a lasting basis when they need an adviser who knows their business, their structure and their economic reality. We also build the tax analysis into our commercial, asset-related, real-estate, succession and transactional advice whenever tax may influence the way a transaction is structured or carried out.
We do not see tax advice as the mere preparation of returns. The real value appears earlier, in identifying the tax consequences of a decision, comparing the alternatives and anticipating risks. The same economic purpose may be achieved through different legal structures and produce tax consequences that also differ, so that tax must form part of the analysis from the moment any transaction is designed.
Tax built into the legal advice
Tax law is present, directly or indirectly, in a large part of the asset and business decisions on which we advise. A sale and purchase of assets, an acquisition or transfer of quotas —the “participaciones” of a Spanish limited company—, a real-estate transaction, a change in the company's structure, a reorganisation of assets, a succession or a particular contractual structure may produce tax consequences capable of determining whether the transaction is advisable, what it costs and how it is carried out.
For that reason, where a transaction has a significant tax dimension, the tax analysis forms part of the legal strategy from the outset. It is not simply a matter of determining which taxes will have to be paid once the transaction has completed, but of understanding how tax bears on the various alternatives available and of weighing their legal, economic and tax consequences together.
Ongoing tax advice to companies
We work with clients who are looking for more than a supplier to whom they periodically send the information needed to prepare their returns. The way we provide the service calls for knowledge of the company's business, its structure, its routine transactions and the matters capable of affecting its tax position. That continuing knowledge allows us to respond more quickly, to anticipate issues and to assess the tax consequences of each decision before it becomes irreversible.
We take on the monitoring of the company's periodic and annual tax obligations, the review of its tax position, the analysis of the questions that arise in its ordinary activity and advice on transactions or circumstances calling for specific treatment. Where the company has an in-house structure of its own, the service also covers support for its finance, tax and administration departments.
Tax procedures, audits and defence before the tax authorities
Ongoing tax advice also includes assisting the company in its dealings with the tax authorities. We represent and defend our clients in tax management, verification and audit procedures, examining both the tax questions in dispute and the accounting, contractual and corporate documentation from which the company's position derives.
Where a tax assessment, a penalty or another tax act has to be challenged, we prepare the corresponding appeals and “reclamaciones económico-administrativas” —claims before Spain's specialised tax tribunals— and, where necessary, we take part in the subsequent proceedings before the administrative courts. In these proceedings, particular value attaches to the combination of tax practice with our litigation experience and with whatever prior knowledge we have of the company. A tax audit cannot always be analysed from the tax rules alone, because the facts under examination sometimes arise from contracts, corporate transactions, dealings with shareholders, assets or business decisions whose correct legal interpretation proves decisive.
