Hi,
First of all I am so glad I found this forum. I am looking for professional guidance. I am from canada and running an online consulting service. For now, people pay me in
crypto but business is doing better and a lot of people are asking me to pay via paypal. I got no partners or employees. Gross turnover is about 30k/month.
I would like professional guidance for a viable offshore structure that ;
-keeps my anonymity and privacy agains my governement as well as tax-authority of any kind.
-give me the option to pay for my service by paypal/cc or by
cash transfert via a bank
-gets me the possibily to own a real estates and a car without problems
I would like to avoid making a personnal visit to a bank but I am willing to provide basic documentations. I am looking for a professional that can assist me, I need to do this asap.
I wrote extensively on Canadian rules in another thread but it's worth considering them and thinking about your long term goals.
More or less I'd say what you're asking for is highly difficult and highly risky. Let's go through it step by step.
1. Privacy against government and tax authorities - this is getting harder and harder because of AEOI/
CRS and it's questionable whether this is a good goal to have if you're going to be staying in Canada long term (makes much more sense if you're going to be leaving Canada in the future, or you could do so today I'd supposed. The reason I say it might not be a great goal is it makes it more difficult to claim the income personally later (and you're going to have to do this at some point). Part of the question is what are you trying to achieve through this? If you decided it was the best option (I'd seriously consider alternatives if I were you) they are basically as follows:
- Use a jurisdiction that doesn't have AEOI/CRS (primarily this means Georgia these days) but recognize this probably won't last in the long run a few years from now they'll probably join and then what?
- Use a trust structure where essentially someone else is masking you because all the reporting is going on them (this will have an ongoing cost to it that frankly based on your revenues probably doesn't make much sense for the savings)
- Keep your money in crypto or comparable
- Find someone who you can send money to and who will give you cash in return then use/store the cash
- Leave the country
2. Payments via Paypal or CC - This one pretty much blows most of the options in #1 away because for example you won't have Paypal options in Georgia and CC in general is very limited there compared with many other places (fees higher, etc.) You could receive wires easily and there are
credit card processing options but not great. A trust structure works. Keeping money in crypto doesn't. The option with cash could work if the person was sent the money to them directly and then they paid you in cash...it's an option. Leaving the country also still an option.
3. Possibility to own real estate and a car without problems - just complicated it dramatically further...not so much with a car you can always accumulate some cash and pay for that provided it's say $50k or less (more is going to be a problem unless you're buying from very particular used buyers). It would also be dumb to buy an expensive flashy car if you're not showing income because otherwise where did it come from? Houses are way tougher because there's no way you're going to pay for a house with physical cash. You also can't transfer money from someplace like Georgia for the purchase of a house without that triggering awareness from your local tax authorities (assuming you're talking about buying the house in Canada...if you're buying elsewhere that's a totally different story). A trust can't buy it for you, though it could get purchased and owned via the trust and rented to you at some market rate. It's also possible you could structure some sort of joint venture
investment where you were the operating partner buying property and there was another cash contributing partner and you split the profits. You're also not going to pay for a house with crypto in fact any money that goes into buying a house in your name is going to be tied to you.
There's some planning that normally goes into this process to get someone a reasonable solution for their goals but it's very personalized and you've got to be willing to operate within certain constraints. In theory the trust option is the best option for you but as mentioned it's pretty expensive for what you're talking about so the cost benefit is questionable. So long as you stay away from the house part you've got some options with receiving physical cash but again it takes some setting up and the right relationships.
The bigger question is "What are you trying to achieve?"
My normal recommendation to people in Canada is create a set up that earns you tax free income at a corporate level, repatriate to Canada tax free, take enough money out of the company at favorable dividend rates to live off and leave the rest inside the company and spend it from there but that doesn't achieve everyone's goals. If you're looking to leave the country long term or even willing to that makes a difference. If you're looking for some deep reason for privacy that also makes a difference. Goals should dictate the strategy.
