Expat Regime

Your challenges

Since 1983, Belgium has a special tax regime in place for foreign executives and specialists, temporarily employed in Belgium. Under this special tax regime, (the employers of) expatriates who meet certain conditions, can benefit from a reduction of Belgian income tax and social security contributions.

However, since January 1 2022, a new tax system entered into force – with the ambition to provide more legal certainty. Considering the change in the regime’s scope, conditions and benefits, the new system has a significant impact on all companies using the special tax regime as an incentive to attract or retain top talent in Belgium.

What’s the impact of the new Belgian special tax regime on the various business domains such as reward, finance and employment law? How can you define the actions you need to take to prepare your organisation and your employees that fall under the regime? And how to tackle the communications towards your expatriate employees?

How to deal with change?

We have outlined a holistic approach to help you with the changes linked to the Belgian expat tax status within your organisation:

Initial impact analysis

This includes a first impact analysis of your employees on their ability to opt-in for this new regime and/or if this is interesting for them/you as employer in a comprehensive report.

Communication strategy

After identifying the different internal stakeholders, we jointly agree on a communication plan to inform and support them. Depending on the options per employee (opt-in, opt-out, ordinary Belgian resident taxpayer) we agree on the additional level of support in view of a potential full impact assessment per employee. Alternatively, we can support in hosting general information sessions to explain the technical, talent and reward implications.

Full impact analysis

In this phase, we calculate the impact for each employee, based on the initial assessment, and screen additional benefit plans. In addition, we would review the employment contracts and commitments made at onboarding to assess the labour law implications. Depending on the outcome hereof, we would help you drafting updated employee contracts or annexes to their contract.

Employee communications

This includes the set up of one-to-one meetings with selected employees.

How we can help

With our dedicated team of individual income taxation, immigration, social security, communication, technology and legal consultants, we can assist you with all compliance related matters and we enable you to make appropriate use of the new expat tax regime, as well as your future global workforce strategy.We follow a specific methodology with the use of various tools for (big) data analytics and provide a Deloitte monitoring mobile app that can be used in the exchange of information to enhance the client experience in a secure way.