Tax Compliance Certificate & Strategic Tax Advisory

In January 2026 a privately held Somali company brought Veynuus in as its financial and tax advisory partner while under assessment pressure from the Inland Revenue Authority. The IRA had been using the company's annual income statements to calculate and enforce an assessment that, left unaddressed, would have produced a substantially inflated bill. The company was also operating without a valid Tax Clearance Certificate, which had begun to create contractual bottlenecks. The mandate covered both problems: correct the underlying tax position, and secure the certificate.

The company's exposure was not the result of avoidance or of a dispute about the law. It was the result of presentation. Staff taxation percentages had not been properly structured, so payroll was being treated in a way that did not reflect the correct categories. The income declarations that had gone to the authority did not accurately represent the taxable position. On that basis the company stood to pay considerably more than it legally owed, purely because of poor documentation, weak structuring and the absence of anyone engaging the authority on its behalf with the relevant expertise.

Assessment practice makes this expensive to leave alone. Where a taxpayer's own records are the only material available, the annual income statement becomes the basis for assessment whether or not it was prepared with tax treatment in mind. Most Somali companies produce those statements for management or for a bank, not for the IRA, and the difference between the two purposes is exactly where overexposure accumulates.

The missing Tax Clearance Certificate compounded matters and constrained the timeline. Without it the company could not comfortably continue bidding or contracting, so the tax position could not be worked through at leisure and the certificate applied for afterwards. Both had to be pursued in the same window, with the added difficulty that a company in dispute over an assessment is not in a straightforward position from which to request clearance.

Veynuus started with payroll, because it was the part of the position that could be corrected on the facts rather than argued. The team reviewed and restructured the company's staff taxation percentages so that they were correctly categorised and compliant with IRA regulations. That removed unnecessary overexposure at source: where a category had been applied too broadly, the correction reduced the liability without any need for concession from the authority, because the revised treatment was simply the right one.

The second strand was the income statements the IRA was relying on. The team analysed them and worked to present a more accurate and legally sound financial picture on the client's behalf. The point was not to produce different numbers but to produce a properly reasoned account of what those numbers represented for tax purposes, with the supporting documentation attached to it. An assessment built on an unexplained statement is difficult to challenge; an assessment considered against a documented position is a different conversation.

Engagement with the authority was handled directly and in person. There is a judgement call in this kind of work about tone. A company that arrives adversarial invites scrutiny of everything it has ever filed; a company that concedes early pays for the privilege. Veynuus's position was neither: the restructured payroll and the reworked statements were put forward as the correct picture, with the reasoning shown, and the discussion proceeded from there.

All of this ran under time pressure, since the certificate was needed for the company to keep operating and bidding. The team therefore worked the assessment and the clearance application as one sequence rather than two, so that the corrected position was the record against which clearance was considered. Attempting them separately would have meant the authority assessing the company twice on two different sets of papers.

Delivery had three components. The first was the restructuring of staff taxation: going through the payroll categories, establishing the correct treatment for each, and rebuilding the schedules so the company's ongoing filings would be right rather than merely defensible for one year. The second was the review and repositioning of the income statements, together with the documentation that supports them.

The third was the negotiation and acquisition of the Tax Clearance Certificate itself, which meant attendance, follow-up and continued engagement with the authority until the certificate was issued rather than promised. In a compressed timeline, that presence is most of the work. Files that are followed move; files that are submitted and awaited do not.

The client's own finance function was involved throughout, since the restructured payroll treatment only holds if the people running the payroll understand it. Handover covered the revised categories and the documentary basis for the position taken, so that the following year's filings could be prepared on the same footing without external support.

Through the restructuring and the structured engagement with the IRA, the client achieved a 30 per cent reduction in what it would have paid had it approached the process alone. The Tax Clearance Certificate was secured. Compliance was restored, and the company's obligations were placed in a sustainable and well-documented framework rather than settled as a one-off.

The distinction matters. A reduction obtained by concession lasts one cycle and leaves the same weakness in place for the next assessment. A reduction obtained by correcting how payroll is categorised and how income is presented changes the position the company files from thereafter. The client came out of the engagement with a lower liability, a valid certificate, and a documented basis for both.

A significant share of what Somali companies pay in tax above what they owe is a documentation problem rather than a policy one. Nothing in this engagement involved a novel legal argument. It involved structuring payroll correctly, presenting income accurately, and engaging the authority with someone in the room who knew what the correct treatment was.

It also shows why financial advisory and compliance work sit together in the same practice. Treating the certificate as a separate administrative errand, to be run after the assessment was settled, would have cost the client time it did not have and weakened its position on both. The two were the same problem, and were handled as one.

• Staff taxation restructuring
• Income statement review & repositioning
• TCC negotiation & acquisition