Business Across Borders: Getting To Grips With Global Compliance

TMF Group's Global Benchmark Complexity Index is a bold initiative assessing the complexity of conducting corporate secretarial activities in more than 80 countries. The study seeks to highlight the often intangible burden faced by multinational companies with legal entities in numerous jurisdictions around the world. It was undertaken to explore and identify why compliance in certain places is more complex than in others and ranks the countries accordingly.

Multinational companies often find it difficult to assess the complexity of corporate secretarial annual obligations in jurisdictions around the world. And so working out the appropriate level and type of resource required to ensure compliance can be a minefield. Businesses need a reliable, impartial benchmark to identify and anticipate the level of expertise that is required for the effective compliance of subsidiaries in each relevant jurisdiction.

The study shows that a jurisdiction's complexity is not defined by one factor alone; instead it is a combination of characteristics including political and economic stability, geographic location, particular local requirements and the state of public infrastructure enabling compliance activities.

The ranking provided by the study highlights the relative complexity of jurisdictions. This information allows multinationals to accurately match the geographic footprint of their subsidiaries to internal and external/outsourced resource solutions which may be available to them. The study...