Business Structure diagram at Your Legal HQ Lawyers, Osborne Park, Perth

Business Structuring.

Every business needs a structure. For the most part, accountants and business advisors tend to look at this primarily from the perspective of tax efficiency and administrative convenience.

However, there are other factors which need to be considered in order to choose the best business structure for you. These include:

  • Asset protection

  • Long term control

  • Exit strategy

  • Enforceability (of arrangement between the co-owners of the business).

It is easy to think that you can fix these issues down the track after the business has matured. However, fixing a business structure might involve paying transaction costs like capital gains tax (CGT) and stamp duty.

Investing a little bit more time and resources in planning things through at the beginning means that you can avoid these types of cost-shocks down the line.

Business structure and restructure plan with asset protection at Your Legal HQ Lawyers, Osborne Park, Perth

Business Restructuring.

Business structures are like cars.  Sometimes you need to change them or upgrade them to deal with new or evolving circumstances.  Clinging to your old structure may cause you more harm than good.

Restructuring a business is not an easy task.  There are numerous legal and tax issues that need to be considered before you put pen to paper.  Missing a step could negate the benefit of the restructure or cost you additional dollars in income tax and stamp duty. 

Traditionally, accountants have handled most business restructures by engaging commercial lawyers to prepare the legal documents, as and when required.  The downside with this is that most commercial lawyers are not tax lawyers, which means that some tax issues get lost in translation which can be frustrating for both client and accountant.  Worst case, there is a substantive hole in the documents and the accountant and lawyer are left pointing the finger at each other.

Your Legal HQ is one of the few tax practices outside of the big firms.  We understand tax, so we know what your accountant is driving at when they tell us what they propose to do with your business restructure.  We can also use our own tax expertise to tweak things when the opportunity presents itself.