Why does Canada discriminate against small companies doing business abroad?

Canadian Controlled Private Companies (CCPC's) receive a lower rate of corporate tax on business profits up to a certain threshold. However, this favourable rate does not apply to foreign business income which is taxed at the full higher rate of corporate tax. Why? Surely Canada should be encouraging its small companies to do business abroad.

I am aware of a situation where a relatively small service business with an international aspect has incorporated a company in the UK to transact its non-Canadian business. A major part of the rationale was the higher tax on foreign profits on CCPC’s levied by Canada. The UK has a roughly equivalent small business rate for profits up to a certain (significantly higher) threshold and this applies no matter where the profits are earned. (There is also no equivalent rule to “Canadian Control”, just the profit threshold.) The corporate structure in this instance is not straightforward and demonstrates the hoops that businesses must jump through and expense they must incur to be taxed fairly. “Fair” in this case does not mean avoid tax – it just means pay similar tax to comparable Canadian domestic corporations.

The bottom line here is that Canada loses out on tax on part of the global income on this operation. Better to pay no tax than pay less tax! There are other situations where Canada applies rules in an attempt to stop tax “leakage” and ends up severely handicapping businesses and/or getting no tax instead of some tax. (Some material for future blogs.) However, the situation in this blog does not even appear to have that logic behind it. I would welcome comments from readers – is there something I'm missing here?

I am certainly no defender of the UK tax system in general and will likely have plenty to say about that in future. However, the fact that I'm comparing the UK tax system favourably should in itself set off alarm bells somewhere.

This appears as yet another example of a self serving Canadian tax system - one that has been developed piecemeal by bureaucrats and politicians who have no clue about what drives business.

What is Risk?

The following thoughts were composed by Dr. Rick Nason, Principal of RSD Solutions LLC and Associate Professor of Finance at Dalhousie University in Canada.

For a brief time I was the Head of a new Risk Management Centre at Dalhousie University. While Director, I had an epiphany – everyone thinks that everything they do is about risk management! While I was not so naïve to think that the world was only concerned about financial risk (after all my background was in doing risk analysis of health effects of radiation and in a different vein the risk analysis of nuclear power plants), what I was surprised by was that virtually everything can in a broad sense be classified as risk management depending on what one’s personal (or corporate) definition of risk was.

For a long time I have used my definition of risk to be, “risk is the possibility that bad or good things may happen”. This definition encompasses three components: (1) an element of the future, (2) an element of uncertainty, and (3) a realization that risk has both an upside component as well as a downside component. For the purposes of financial risk management this has proven to be a very practical and workable definition of risk. The questions remains, is it sufficient for risk management purposes in a broader sense? What are the elements that the definition is lacking or limiting? What factors might be overlooked with this definition?

Take a minute and ask yourself – “what is your definition of risk?” Can you express it in a form that your colleagues and peers would understand? Would your friends or family members understand it? Would your definition extend to your dealings with family and friends? – Should it?

Risk is a popular area of best business practices – and rightly so. However if the field is to be truly useful, a practical and actionable definition is necessary. Is your company’s definition of risk up to the task? Is your personal definition of risk up to the task?

Credit Risk and Capital: A Basic Primer - Executive Summary

This is a summary of an article by David Finnie of RSD Solutions LLC. The full article can be found in the "Resources" section of RSD Solutions' web site (www.RSDsolutions.com).

Building an integrated risk management capability has been of paramount interest for many financial institutions over the past decade or so. Increasingly, non-financial firms have begun to see the value of this framework. Financial institutions are looking for an ability to capture all of their risks in a fungible, useful format. A format that allows them to understand, as fully as possible, their total risk profile, their risk composition and their risk return performance. Non-financial firms can use the same framework to acchttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifomplish the same understanding and, importantly, to determine how much capital is required to maintain debt ratings and shareholder expectations and to allow the successful execution of the firm’s organizational strategies.

The framework to accomplish integrated risk management and risk-based capital management is an economic capital framework. The Credit Risk and Capital Basic Primer, available on the RSD Solutions website (), outlines the approaches and methodology to develop the capital needed to support the credit risk activities of the firm.

To build a fully developed economic capital framework, a risk capital framework capturing credit, market and operational risk is needed. For non-financial firms, this is necessary but insufficient since many of their capital needs are derived from non-risk factors. For this reason, it is also necessary to deal with infrastructure needs, business model attributes and strategic needs among others.

Credit and Counterparty Risk is the potential for loss due to the failure of a borrower, endorser, guarantor or counterparty to repay a loan or honor another predetermined financial obligation.

Credit Risk Capital is needed to provide protection for Unexpected Losses (ULs). Expected Losses, those losses that would be expected given the portfolio of obligations held by the firm, need to be built into the pricing of those obligations. A simple example – a high risk bond provides a higher interest rate than a low risk bond. Unexpected Losses are the variances around the Expected Losses. These losses are covered by the firm’s capital.

The development of credit risk capital depends on the three key concepts needed to determine Expected Loss – Exposure at Default, Probability of Default and Loss Given Default. To bring this to Unexpected Loss, the volatilities of these variables and the correlation of the assets within the credit portfolio are also needed.

Probability of Default is the critical driver of capital in this model and is expressed in the capital equation as the cumulative distribution function for a standard normal random variable (refer to The Credit Risk and Capital Basic Primer, available on the RSD Solutions website) which includes the inverse cumulative distribution function for a standard normal random variable. The complex set of equations boils down to some very simple relationships:

• Diversity matters – both in terms of the diversity within the portfolio (i.e. the direct relationship between individual obligors) as well as the relationship of the portfolio to general economic conditions.
• The loss distribution is generally characterized as “fat-tailed” (or leptokurtotic) which means that to reach a given confidence level, one must move out further along the distribution than for a normal distribution.
• The capital result is heavily dependent upon the risk of the underlying obligor or portfolio of obligors – each level of risk entails a different distribution of losses and, as the risk increases, the distribution becomes increasingly “fat-tailed” – the capital requirement increases at an increasing rate as risk deteriorates.

As the Credit Risk Capital Primer concludes, the amount of capital required to support credit operations can be managed through standard credit decision frameworks and through effective credit facility pricing.

Small Business Tax Nightmares

Working out your tax in any jurisdiction is bad enough. I have lived in the US, UK and Canada at various times and have had a taste of doing personal tax returns in all three. All three tax regimes appear over complex and fraught with risks of errors and penalties, even for the expert. Compliance is extremely onerous or expensive (usually both) to comply with. The pain of the US system is tempered only slightly by generally lower taxes.

Now with a small company doing business in all three I am just about to throw up my hands and surrender and ask why anyone would subject themselves to such agony. One particular annoyance we have found is the way US limited companies (LLC's) are treated. In the US they are partnerships with income taxed at the individual partner level. Canada and the UK view them as companies taxable at the corporate level. The outcome is that double taxation can be suffered by LLC's operating in the UK or Canada. There is no relief to be found in the tax treaties.

This is great for expert tax practitioners charging premium hourly rates who advise on optimum corporate structures. However, such experts are often unaffordable for start-up and small companies. The risk is on the business and its owners who want to get on with business and not spend half their time bogged down in a tax quagmire.

Why cannot the tax authorities should take a more pragmatic, flexible and fair view of such situations? This would not necessarily result in less tax being collected - perhaps more if people have more time to get out and earn revenue in their businesses. It is the honest people who often end up being screwed tax wise. What would be the harm in the Canadian and UK tax authorities being able to view LLC the same way as the US in the name of fairness? Why does the risk fall totally on the small business person? Of course large tax bureaucracies have grown up whose existence is, partly at least, justified by creating, constantly changing and enforcing a huge body of complex rules and regulations.