Where the line falls on visits
What people can and cannot do on a trip, set out for the teams who actually travel.
Corporate immigration
Global mobility.
Moving people between markets creates obligations in both places at once. The immigration position is usually the one that gets the attention, and it is frequently not the one that causes the problem.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The commonest version is a business visit that was not a visit. Somebody travels to meet clients, and while they are there they do work. Where the line falls between activities permitted on a visit and activities requiring permission is set by rules that differ between countries and change over time, and it is a line that is easy to cross with no intention of crossing it.
The next is the employee who moved and told nobody. Somebody relocates for family reasons and carries on doing the same job remotely from another country. The employer finds out later, and by then there may be obligations in that country covering employment, tax and social security, alongside whatever the individual's own status there requires. None of it was considered and all of it accrues quietly.
Then there is the transfer nobody sequenced. A team is sent to open a market, and the entity is not registered, the payroll does not exist, the premises are not taken and the permissions have not been applied for. People arrive into a situation where they cannot lawfully be paid, or in some cases cannot lawfully be working there at all.
The quietest version is a group arrangement that does not match reality. On paper somebody is employed by one entity and assigned to another. In practice they are managed, paid and directed by a third. Where a route depends on the relationship between the individual and the sponsoring organisation, a mismatch of that kind is a problem waiting for somebody to ask about it.
What actually decides it
The receiving country decides, not yours. Every part of an inbound move is governed by the rules of the place the person is going to, and those rules differ in ways that are not intuitive: what counts as work, whether an employer needs a local presence, what a family member may do, and whether time spent counts towards anything. Advice in the destination country is not optional and it should be taken early.
Immigration is one of several regimes and it is rarely the one that produces the bill. Tax residence, employment rights that attach automatically to somebody working in a country, social security, whether the business has created a taxable presence, and data obligations can all follow a single person across a border. The question is not simply whether the person can enter. It is what the organisation acquires by having them there.
The structure has to match what actually happens. Who employs, who pays, who directs and who bears the cost are separate questions, and arrangements answering them differently from the reality tend to fail at the point somebody examines them. Where a group uses a local entity, an employer of record or a secondment, the paperwork has to describe what is genuinely being done.
Then there is sequence. Entity, banking, payroll, premises and permissions have dependencies between them, and the order they are done in decides whether people can start when the business needs them. The parts that take longest are usually the parts nobody begins until everything else is ready. Timing here is governed by rules and processes that change, so plans should be built with room in them rather than to a fixed expectation.
What we do
Inbound moves
People brought into the United Kingdom with the route, the entity and the payroll lined up in the right order.
Outbound and remote workers
Employees sitting in other countries, and what that creates for the organisation there.
Group transfers
Movement inside a corporate group structured so the paperwork matches how people are genuinely managed.
Sequencing an expansion
Entity, banking, premises and permissions ordered so people can start when the business needs them.
Local advice, co ordinated
Specialists in each destination brought together, with regulated immigration advice delivered by our regulated partners.
When to spend nothing
Not every trip is a mobility question. Ordinary travel for ordinary business activity is what visitor arrangements exist for, and treating every flight as a project is a way of making a function look busy. What is worth having is a short internal rule on what people may do while abroad and an obvious route to ask before doing anything unusual. That costs a page of policy and prevents most of what goes wrong.
It is also worth resisting structures built for elegance. A group that reorganises itself around a mobility plan usually ends up with entities it does not need and filings it will forget. Where a move is genuinely temporary and the person will come back, the simplest arrangement that is accurate beats the sophisticated one that is not.
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.