The questions international clients ask us first.
Twenty questions from foreign-owned groups, family offices, and their advisers, answered the way we answer them in the room.
Choosing and working with Medora.
Why choose Medora over other firms?
Clients choose JK Medora because they value experienced judgement, continuity and direct access to senior advisers. We combine big-firm technical standards with boutique responsiveness, delivering practical, partner-led advice across audit, valuation, restructuring and advisory matters. Through our membership of DFK International and LEA Global, clients enjoy international reach without sacrificing the personal attention, accountability and long-term relationships that are increasingly rare in the profession.
How does a mid-tier Singapore audit firm compare with the Big 4 for a foreign-owned subsidiary?
The structural differences are senior attention, continuity, and cost structure. In a mid-tier practice the engagement is led by the person who signs the opinion, senior staff stay on the file year over year, and cross-border coordination runs through firms the practice already works with, including DFK International and LEA Global member firms.
A global firm is the right answer where the group auditor requires its own firm's coverage in every territory, or where a listing or regulatory mandate demands it. Where the choice is genuinely open, the question a foreign-owned subsidiary should ask is whether it is buying the audit or the brand.
While the Big 4 are often the natural choice for large listed groups and highly complex multinational structures, many foreign-owned subsidiaries find greater value in working directly with experienced partners and managers who understand both local regulatory requirements and the expectations of overseas parent companies. The result is often a more efficient audit process, faster decision-making and more practical advice, without compromising on quality, independence or international connectivity.
How do we ensure compliance in Singapore?
Treat compliance as a calendar, not a scramble. A Singapore company lives on a cycle of statutory obligations, accounts preparation, the annual general meeting and annual return with ACRA, and tax filings with IRAS, and each has dates that follow from the financial year end. The entities that stay comfortably compliant are the ones that map that calendar once, assign each obligation an owner, and let the audit act as the annual checkpoint that everything upstream actually happened.
Where the audit surfaces gaps, late records, missing reconciliations, undocumented balances, they become next year's fixes with names attached, which is considerably less costly than discovering them under a regulator's letter.
Statutory audit and group reporting.
What is the audit exemption threshold in Singapore?
A Singapore private company qualifies as a small company, and is exempt from statutory audit, if it meets at least two of these three criteria for the immediate past two consecutive financial years: total annual revenue of S$10 million or less, total assets of S$10 million or less, or 50 employees or fewer. A company that belongs to a group must also qualify on a consolidated group basis.
The exemption applies to private companies only, and the financial statements must still be prepared and filed. Figures per ACRA at the time of writing; the current ACRA criteria always govern. The full decision path is in our audit exemption guide.
Do I need IFRS or SFRS for my Singapore subsidiary?
Singapore-incorporated companies prepare financial statements under Singapore Financial Reporting Standards. For entities applying SFRS(I), the standards are equivalent to IFRS Accounting Standards as issued by the IASB, so a Singapore subsidiary reporting to an IFRS parent can usually align local statutory reporting with the group framework.
Where the parent reports under another framework, such as US GAAP or a national GAAP, the subsidiary typically maintains statutory accounts locally and submits a separate group reporting pack. We advise on the appropriate framework as part of audit planning.
How long does a Singapore statutory audit take?
It depends on the state of the accounting records, the complexity of the entity, and the group reporting deadlines it must meet. We agree the timetable at planning, working back from your filing and group deadlines, and we hold to it. We do not quote a standard duration, because a figure given before we have seen the records would not be a serious one.
What will you need from us, and how demanding will the audit be?
At planning we issue a single requirements list covering the trial balance, supporting schedules, statutory records, and the evidence for significant judgements and estimates. A well-kept finance function should find nothing unusual in it.
The demands on your team rise with the quality gap in the records, not with the audit itself, and where we see that gap early we say so early.
Can Medora act as component auditor for an overseas group auditor?
Yes. The firm audits Singapore entities within international groups and reports to parent-company auditors under their group instructions, including reporting packs for parents in the UK, US, EU, Japan, and Korea. Working relationships with firms in other jurisdictions, including DFK International and LEA Global member firms, mean coordination is already warm where it is needed.
In addition to DFK International and LEA Global member firms, the practice regularly works with other firms as component auditor, including the Big 4.
Can Medora take over from our existing auditor?
Yes. A change of auditor in Singapore follows a defined professional courtesy: the incoming firm seeks professional clearance from the outgoing one before accepting the appointment, and the handover includes access to the prior-year file positions that matter for opening balances. The practical questions are timing ones. A transition is easiest agreed shortly after a year end has been signed off, so the new firm plans the next audit from the start rather than inheriting one mid-flight.
For a foreign-owned entity, the group dimension is handled in the same move: the parent's auditor is informed, component instructions are redirected, and the reporting pack format carries over without disruption.
Corporate tax, GST, and cross-border positions.
What is the corporate tax rate in Singapore?
Singapore taxes companies at a flat rate of 17 per cent of chargeable income, for local and foreign companies alike. The effective rate is often lower than the headline because of exemption schemes and rebates that change from one Year of Assessment to the next, so effective-rate planning should always be done against the current IRAS position rather than a remembered one.
Figure per IRAS, verified July 2026.
When must a Singapore company register for GST?
Registration is compulsory when taxable turnover exceeds S$1 million, measured retrospectively, or when it can reasonably be expected to exceed S$1 million in the next twelve months, measured prospectively. GST applies at 9 per cent to standard-rated supplies made on or after 1 January 2024.
Voluntary registration below the threshold can make commercial sense for some businesses and is worth assessing rather than assuming. Figures per IRAS, verified July 2026.
Do we need transfer pricing documentation in Singapore?
Singapore applies the arm's length principle, and IRAS sets documentation requirements that depend on the company's revenue and the size and type of its related-party transactions. Whether your entity falls within the mandatory documentation rules, and what proportionate documentation looks like if it does not, is a factual assessment we make against the current IRAS requirements rather than a one-line answer.
What is constant is the direction of travel: intercompany arrangements without contemporaneous support are increasingly difficult to defend, in Singapore as everywhere else the arm's length principle is enforced.
How does Medora support UK and other foreign headquarters moving into Asia through Singapore?
The recurring work is structural: establishing the Singapore entity's tax residency, assessing permanent establishment risk in the countries it will sell into, applying the relevant tax treaty provisions, setting withholding tax positions on flows between Singapore and the parent, and putting transfer pricing documentation in place before the first intercompany invoice rather than after the first IRAS query.
The firm's senior tax specialists have advised on cross-border restructuring, corporate amalgamation, and business transfers, and working relationships with firms in the parent jurisdiction, including DFK International and LEA Global member firms, connect the practice to the advisers it needs.
Structures, incentives, and the 13O and 13U schemes.
What is a family office in Singapore?
A family office is a private structure that manages the wealth of a single family: its investments, its holding entities, and the administration around them. In Singapore the arrangement typically pairs a fund vehicle that holds the family's investible assets with a management entity, the single family office, that employs the professionals who manage them.
The structure exists to give the family institutional-grade management, governance, and continuity across generations.
What is the difference between Section 13O and Section 13U?
Both are Singapore fund tax incentive schemes under which specified income from designated investments is exempt from tax, and both are available to funds managed by single family offices subject to MAS conditions. Under current published MAS conditions, Section 13O requires a minimum of S$20 million in designated investments at the point of application and throughout the incentive period, with at least two investment professionals of whom at least one is not a family member. Section 13U requires a minimum of S$50 million and at least three investment professionals, of whom at least one is not a family member.
Both schemes carry tiered local business spending requirements starting at S$200,000 and require a private banking account with a MAS-licensed financial institution. Conditions change; the current MAS conditions govern any application.
How much money do you need to set up a family office in Singapore?
There is no legal minimum to establish a family office structure itself. The economics are driven by the tax incentives: under current MAS conditions the Section 13O scheme requires at least S$20 million in designated investments, and Section 13U requires at least S$50 million, in each case at the point of application and maintained throughout the incentive period.
Families below those levels can still hold and manage assets through Singapore structures, but without the fund tax incentives the case needs to be argued on other grounds.
What is a VCC and when is it used?
The Variable Capital Company is a Singapore corporate structure for investment funds, launched by MAS and ACRA in January 2020. It permits flexible issue and redemption of shares and payment of dividends from capital, and it can be set up as a standalone fund or as an umbrella with segregated sub-funds.
For family offices, an umbrella VCC can hold distinct investment strategies or family branches in separate sub-funds while consolidating administration, and an umbrella VCC files a single corporate income tax return with IRAS regardless of the number of sub-funds.
When things go wrong, and when people move.
What does a forensic accountant do in Singapore proceedings?
A forensic accountant reconstructs what the financial records actually show and presents it in a form a court, a regulator, or a liquidation committee can rely on. In practice that means investigating suspected fraud or misappropriation, quantifying losses and damages, tracing funds and assets across entities and jurisdictions, critiquing the other side's expert evidence, and reporting findings to the Court, to management, or to authorities such as CPIB where the engagement requires it.
What is the difference between an MVL and a CWU?
A members' voluntary liquidation (MVL) is a solvent process: the shareholders resolve to wind the company up and the liquidator distributes the assets after debts are paid in full. A compulsory winding up (CWU) is ordered by the Court, typically on a creditor's application against an insolvent company, and commonly involves investigation into the company's affairs alongside asset realisation.
The right route depends on solvency, on the state of the records, and on whether anything in the company's history needs to be investigated rather than simply wound down.
What salary does an Employment Pass require in Singapore?
For applications before 1 January 2027, the minimum qualifying salary is S$5,600 for most sectors and S$6,200 for financial services, rising progressively with age to S$10,700 and S$11,800 respectively at age 45 and above. From 1 January 2027 the entry figures rise to S$6,000 and S$6,600.
Meeting the salary floor is necessary but not sufficient: most applications must also earn 40 points under MOM's Complementarity Assessment Framework, COMPASS, which scores salary, qualifications, workforce diversity, and support for local employment. Figures per MOM, verified July 2026; the current MOM criteria always govern. The full criteria are set out in our EP and immigration hub.