Our Client is a private equity fund manager with €1 billion AUM, a small back office, and a few US investments. They came to Optax because they needed to provide complete and valid documentation to the US payor.
Other than collecting US forms as a part of their normal onboarding process, they have limited experience managing US withholding tax requirements. When a US payor requested withholding documentation for a payment, they reached out for advice.
The Client group entity was structured as a UK partnership and had approximately 100 investors, this meant that they needed to provide an intermediary form W-8IMY, a withholding statement to allocate the payment across the investors, and valid underlying forms W-9 and W-8 for all the investors.
In addition to validating the tax forms we introduced them to our Emprise withholding tax module which could allow them to independently manage this documentation request going forward.
While our Client originally expected to use the tool for managing US withholding tax, they also now rely on the document management module to store all fund documents and the export features to extract data related to group entities and investors on one Excel sheet to minimise or eliminate the use of Excel data tools.
Emprise solutions:
- Document management module – to track, validate, extract form data, and store all required documentation
- Group entity relationship table – to store, visualise, and export all specific entity investor information
- Group entity distribution module – to allocate payments to a group entity’s investors (including through underlying intermediaries), manage US withholding information to automatically calculate withholding, create a valid US withholding statement, and export all required US forms
