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High confidence level is important before you go offshore. There are many ways of determining the trustworthiness of offshore companies and professionals. You may not get the right information from the wrong sources. For example, your local banker may not know enough about going offshore or he may discourage you from doing it. The reason is that he is making money by providing banking and other financial services to you. As money flows offshore, the earnings of domestic
banks will decrease.
Lending institutions and banks generally earn money on the arbitrage between what they pay their customers for the use of their money and what they charge others to rent money. Most onshore professionals may be tempted to make disparaging remarks about their offshore counterparts as an act of self-preservation. They want to keep your business. Asset protection experts also warn of asking government officials who have a hidden agenda of abusing the enforcement of property forfeiture laws to raise revenues for their departments. Moving your assets offshore will make them unreachable to officials who wish to seize your assets for forfeiture purposes. Traditional safeguards you
have practiced over the years in selecting local professionals should give you enough information about the trustworthiness of offshore companies, Your confidence or “comfort” level will be bolstered if you get referrals from reputable professionals and consultants. Verifying these referrals is needed. Due diligence efforts must be exerted before funds are transferred to offshore accounts. People who promise high yields on offshore returns on your investment should be shunned. Offshore promoters who offer an enticingly low price or flat fee for taking you to the wide blue yonder should be declined without batting an eyelash.

How many times does this happen in your company? You go to a meeting about sales performance, and Marketing says they think sales are up 3.5%, but the merchants disagree and say sales are up 6.3%. The specific numbers in this example aren’t important; the point is that the two figures aren’t even close. That’s the reality in most companies today.

Or, say management has tasked you with developing a report and you try and go back to prior results, maybe from a season or two ago. How many different versions of the sales, purchase and inventory plans are there? Which ones are the actual and which were prior versions?

Some readers might say we could do a better job of controlling and eliminating versions of plans—which is certainly true, and something every company should work toward. Or you may say if we use only one enterprise system we can eliminate this dilemma. But that isn’t really the solution; such systems aren’t viable for most companies, and anyway, there are multiple data elements that are all valid for whatever processing system is being used. There isn’t a “single version of the truth”—one official set of figures for sales, inventory, plan, history, etc.

Take for example a product’s inventory. You can find sales plans on a user-derived Access system or Excel spreadsheets. A product’s inventory on hand in units and dollars occurs on your order management system. A separate best-of-breed warehouse management system will also include the same product on hand, but needs to be synched up daily. The finance system will also carry the total company inventory in dollars—probably not updated real time, but daily or weekly. You may also have a specialized standalone forecasting and inventory management system, to project inventory by promotion or catalog campaign.

Additionally, because the major transaction systems require a high degree of training, management does not use them as the source for their information. Management has to go to extremes to get what they need, either by requesting that department managers pull data or by using business analysts to come up with reporting. Because these are manual efforts using sources not originally geared to management’s needs, they are delay-riddled, error prone processes. And they still don’t deliver a “single version of the truth.”

You get the picture. There simply isn’t a “single version of the truth” for the major data elements used in many businesses. For management to have confidence in the integrity of the data they’re getting, I think the time has come to advocate and budget for projects that resolve these problems. Such problems are not new, and I believe they inhibit the effective management and growth of direct businesses.

Here is a hierarchy of solutions you should consider:

Extract data from major transaction processing systems into Excel or other reports
Access databases, and business analysts using OLAP tools
Data warehouse products
Business intelligence systems with dashboards and analytics
As the New Year approaches, it’s time to advocate with management for solutions to this problem. Especially in this economy, knowing exactly where you stand is essential. You can only control expenses and inventory and know which products and promotions are working—and which aren’t—if you have accurate data on which everybody across the company can agree. In our experience, companies that used business intelligence systems to overcome such information problems have been successful in getting a positive ROI from these types of systems within 12 to 18 months. And in today’s business environment, that’s a “single version of the truth” on which all companies can agree.

Article written by Brian Barry, a Senior Consultant with F. Curtis Barry & Company, a multichannel operations and fulfillment consulting firm with expertise in multichannel systems, reducing warehouse costs, call center cost reduction, inventory, and benchmarking; Learn more online at: http://www.fcbco.com.

Where should you go to put some of your hard-earned money? Some of the most popular countries or territories for asset protection are Bermuda, Gibraltar, Barbados, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Belize, Labuan, Nevis, Seychelles, Cyprus, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Niue, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Turks and Caicos.
Mintz and Rubens advise clients to choose a jurisdiction with well- established trust laws favorable to asset protection strategies. Further, the jurisdiction should be inconvenient for predators to reach the assets of the trust by commencing an action in the foreign country. Key factors you must consider before you pick a haven should include ease of communications, the availability of experienced and well established trustees, no or low tax jurisdiction, strict bank secrecy laws, favorable trust laws, stable local government, favorable asset protection laws, the absence of exchange or currency controls and confidentiality. Cornez suggests more rigorous standards in evaluating offshore choices. He recommends that you take a look at the general reputation or quality of the tax havens, particularly those with a rich history of business- friendly legislation and flight capital is low. This means that countries with burdensome taxes, long-winded bureaucratic rigmarole, absence of political volatility, and massive court congestion due to numerous lawsuits should be avoided. He cites as examples countries that should not be on your list: Canada, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Venezuela, Australia, South Africa and the United States. Also consider the choice of governing law (British common law or the system called the Westminster model is preferred such as that in Liechtenstein and the French Territories). For purposes of asset protection, Cornez suggests that the haven of your choice should have rules that do not enforce foreign judgments and bankruptcy court orders, no forced heirship rules and no rule against perpetuity and does not honor any tax claim from other jurisdictions. Pick a place in a user-friendly time zone that has English as the principal language with high-quality communications
and Internet servers, especially those equipped with voice scramblers,
full encryption devices and modem-to-modem data transmission facilities.
Like Mintz and Rubens, Cornez wrote that the haven of your choice
should have a democratic and stable central government (such as the
Caymans, the Bahamas, and the federation of St. Kitts and Nevis)
that has not been affected by a change in the governing political party.
You have to choose a country that is not susceptible to violent political
swings, massive corruption, foreign invasions and military coups. More4aisbaIl
over, you must inquire into the levels of banking and financial privacy
and the existence of tax and assistance treaties with your home country. It is also preferable to choose a country with minimal or no currrency regulations or exchange control. It is essential to have the ability
to have asset protection by utilizing a variety of currencies (currency
diversification), as many have done with Swiss annuities, Euros and
others. You should also determine if there are qualified professionals
such as consultants, lawyers, accountants, trustees, and asset and port
established folio managers. Stability of the local currency against the U.S. dollar,
work ethics, religion, labor movements, social life, politics, business
customs, crime, drug involvement, the possibility of getting a second
passport or citizenship and the limitations on real estate ownership are
other factors that should be high on your list.