Welcome to Taxbytes for Expats. The top tax tips

you want to know as an expat. The podcast is here to help

answer the common queries and concerns expats have when moving

to or from Ireland. Complex taxes explained

simply. We'll focus on the Irish and international

tax issues to be aware of to ensure you save time,

money, and stress. Hi,

everyone. Welcome to this episode of Taxbytes for Expats.

Today, we're speaking with Tim Hulen, founder and CEO

of Deciem, an app that enables people to log on and track

their tax residents. In a previous life, Tim was an airline pilot

for 22 years so he's familiar with moving across

borders and the tax implications that come with that but he got a bit

bored of completing all the spreadsheets that tracked his presence and

whereabouts So he decided to build an app And today we're going to talk

about that and how it might be of interest to some of our listeners

So thank you so much for joining us Tim. It's really, really nice to have

you on the show. Thank you. It's good to be here. Can I pronounce your

second name correctly? Because you know in Ireland we have funny ways of saying second

names sometimes when they're in our native language? You did a pretty good job,

its "Hew-lin" is the

pronunciation but its an old Jersey name which is where I'm from.

Okay. So you're in Jersey at the moment. So maybe that leads nicely into

a bit about you. Tell us about you and your background because,

yeah, I find it very interesting. I think our listeners will as well.

Yeah. So I sort of grew up in Jersey. I'm from, well, my father's side

of the family. I've been here for generations and, left school

and, decided I was going to travel around. So

traveling's always been something I've been interested in. I spent 4 years working as a

ski photographer in ski results in the French Alps, and then summers back in Jersey.

So whilst my mates were at uni, I was skiing predominantly, which

suited me fine. And then worked for National Newspapers in the UK for a little

bit. So moved to the UK for a time, worked at The Times in the

mail on Sunday, and then kind of thought, well, I probably need to get a

slightly more sensible job. So, had a couple of mates who were pilots and

they said, oh, yeah, it's you'll easily get a job in Jersey. The local airline

was recruiting. So I kind of did my commercial pilot's license quite quickly,

quite spontaneously, and, and got a job based in Jersey with,

an airline. I did a couple of years there and then moved from Jersey to

the UK and Mhmm. Started with a bigger airline,

European carrier. And, yeah, spent the best part of, well, just over 20 years with

them and right up until COVID happened. And, then we all got

furloughed, which I suppose is where the Daisy story begins. Yeah.

So I suppose as a pilot moving quite frequently,

Dacian, they really the concept links in very much with your your

previous job as a pilot. Tell us a little bit about Jaceum

and how being a pilot gave you the idea. So, yeah, once we

were kind of everyone was all the all pilots in the world basically were were

furloughed. I I kind of just didn't fancy sitting around for 6 months to find

that literally aviation worldwide had come to a clattering halt and,

be made redundant effectively. So I was keen to start a business. I'd always sort

of dabbled in in tech businesses and had ideas. And and I kept on coming

back to this idea of having a black box for business. We have a black

box in an aircraft, which is designed to basically contain,

what happened so that we can learn from it, and it can also preempt things

that are about to go wrong as well. So the idea of having that in

a business, seemed to be quite, an interesting sort of topic.

And we quickly established talking to various software people and friends who are in the

dev industry that, data doesn't behave very well. So

plugging a black box into a business isn't it's not something you can actually create.

But I had a chance conversation with a friend of mine who worked in a

family office, and she was saying, oh, we we needed a black box for our

for our business because we had a tax inquiry. And it literally resulted in

boxes and boxes of paperwork, a photocopier, and

and had to hire an additional office and some people to go through it over

years years of paperwork trying to just satisfy the questions from this

tax inspector. So we kind of went down this tax use case rabbit hole

with that, bringing that kind of past, of of aviation with me,

as to as to how we could kinda create something. And then at the same

time, I was just acutely aware of having moved from the UK back to

Jersey after about 4 years that of the statutory residence test and then

having to be really careful with the number of days I could spend back in

the UK, but also affected by the fact that I was a pilot. So there's

rules that were there. So it's a real kind of juggling game of of keeping

a logbook for my flying hours. And then alongside that, a sort of spreadsheet to

count my my days in the UK and make sure I didn't go over any

limits. And it was a real kind of challenge to wrap your head around all

of those rules in a pretty clunky, time consuming process,

wondering if you kind of got it right or not. And that's common, I

think, in in terms of people. Generally, one of the first questions

they'll have is, you know, am I tax resident of a jurisdiction?

And, unfortunately it's not simple to answer that question,

generally because each jurisdiction has their own rules. So I think what you're alluding

to there is in the UK the rules are, they're quite convoluted really, aren't they?

You know, there's quite a few tests and, I'm not an expert in them

by any means, but it sounds to me like DECIEM

is trying to offer technology to simplify the record keeping

purposes that go with this question of have I become a

tax resident somewhere? Is that really what the the app is trying to do? Yeah.

Exactly. So so the what tends to happen is so, well, for my

me, for example, I went to a tax adviser. I told them what my situation

was, what I wanted to achieve. I was told what the rules were, and the

advice was, and keep records. And I thought, well, that's great. I can keep records.

And and you see this commonly if you if you just Google statutory residence test,

in the UK, you'll get all of the firms will give their own advice,

or sorry, not advice, but they will describe the rules to you, and they'll say

Anki records. And if you go to HMRC's website, they they define the law, and

they say Anki records. And everyone starts off with the best of intentions, but without

the container for that data and documentation, but more importantly, the process as to how

do you keep and gather that stuff and what is important and how do you

do it. People are kind of left to make it up themselves. And and, depending

on your your your, I suppose, your tech savviness will be dependent on

the quality of the data that you collect. And one of the things that we

realized is from talking to contentious tax experts who we sort of partner with through

DayZion was that counting your days and having a boarding pass doesn't mean anything. It

doesn't mean you were on that flight. It doesn't mean you left the UK. All

it means is that you bought a ticket and you obtained a boarding pass. And

so for high net worth people where a tax investigation can come

become quite granular in the evidence that you need to produce to satisfy the

inspector, this kind of information is really crucial. And what tends to happen is we

have to go back through years of paperwork trying to find fill in the

gaps and answer the questions when, really, what you can have is a

coded application that logs your travel, prompts you to upload

your boarding passes, and enables you to evidence where you were. So that should an

investigation happen, in the event of, you know, in inverted commas,

your crash, which is the similarity between the black box, your black box contains

everything, all of your data and documentation to basically say to an inspector, here we

go. There's nothing to see here. We've got everything. Mhmm. And that frees up everybody

just to move on, go back to their the business that they're in. So we

sit right in the middle of that process between tax inspectors, advisers,

and the clients. And I think as well from a from a

revenues perspective, let's say from an Irish point of view. We've had

queries for clients before, you know, maybe where we're trying to

demonstrate they were or were not in Ireland and to your

point about, you know, we'll keep records, what does that mean? Dayzium as I understand

it is is collecting a lot of information that we as advisors would love

our clients to have to hand And some of the very organized

clients will have beautiful spreadsheets with evidence.

But the problem, I suppose, often comes with, you know, if there's a question

raised about a long time ago. So maybe by a long time I

mean like more than 18 months ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago. It becomes

a bit more difficult then doesn't it if you haven't been organised so obviously

Jason's gonna retain information for quite a period of

time. Who do you think your ideal client is? Is it

somebody who's frequently coming and going or? Yeah. What's the use case

do you think predominantly for it? So I think it's it's it's anybody

who's crossing borders. We're focusing on the high net worth market at the

moment purely because they're the ones that we can help the most by having this

ability to evidence the travel. So if you're somebody who's looking to move

to perhaps exit a business, to move to a different tax jurisdiction, you will naturally

go and get tax advice. Previously, you really should go and get tax advice. That

kicks off the sort of days in process of establishing the rules with your adviser

once we know what those rules are. So for example, in in, Ireland, perhaps

you're working towards the 183 day test. You can't

exceed 183 days. So we will set that tax rule up

inside the, app, the Dayzium app, which will say you can't go more

than a 182 days. And we know what a day means and we don't we

know what tax year is, so we can count days for that. We could also

do Schengen. We could also do UK. UK tax rules are different. So but we

we count per rule, that's coded into it. So once that's established, then you

can just go and travel. And we log movements. So throughout the day, you'll get

various, commercial business addresses, which will appear on a timeline that

you are in that approximate location. And then you have a choice to

verify that location to say, well, actually, that was the,

that was my accountant's I was at, and I was there for a meeting. So

you can then say that you were specifically at a specific address. You could then

upload data and documentation to corroborate that. So if you go to an airport, you

might add your boarding pass to it, which is fine. And then you get on

board the aircraft. And if you take a selfie and add it to that location,

then we're using geotag technology to show that that photo was taken.

You're in it, and quite clearly you onboard the airplane at the time. And then

we go through this sort of process of that's the evidence evidencing side. And then

at the end of the tax year, we can report on all the days. So

we in fact, you can do that anytime with your, adviser so they can see

how many days you've done. Then we go back to the beginning of the process

again. You sort of review, and establish the rules that affect you for the next

year. Mhmm. It's brilliant. So it's a really robust

record that you have, and I suppose it's gonna offer

comfort to people that if a question ever comes,

they have a lovely, as you said, black box to produce. Our experience would

be when these discussions start with revenue about, you know, where were you

and what were you doing? It doesn't surprise me to hear the example

you gave earlier of somebody who was in a family office and who said that

it went on for a long time trying to evidence, you know, proof.

So, you know, it's it's there's a saying that kind of comes up in tax.

It's not what you know, it's what you can prove. So that element of proof

is is really solid. And I think with JCI and I

think as well, it obviously for these high net worth individuals who are moving

frequently, you know, one of the things that kind of comes up in in my

mind when you when you explain the situation of, you know, the use case being

a high net worth individual who travels a lot, There's a very common scenario we

can have particularly between Ireland and the UK whereby an

individual is potentially moving back and forth into Ireland to work

and they could be going to the UK for various reasons. And it's

possible it's not a foregone conclusion, but it's possible that they can become a

resident in both jurisdictions. And then we fall

into some more complicated technical analysis to actually

work out where they're gonna be taxed. And really what that means is how much

taxes are they gonna pay? Because in that scenario then one country's

gonna get the right to tax them. So the use case I think is is

is exponential, but it's it's really good to hear that you've noted it down to,

you know, this cohort initially who I think are gonna be very interested to hear

that the technology exists and it's it's being tested and and

used. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And and I think that, because we have

partners who are tax advisers, and accountancy firms,

that we sell via essentially, so they introduce us, is the way that

is the way that we work, means that we get a lot of specific

understanding of the problems, that the clients face.

But also, you know, tax legislation, we can get a deep understanding that in various

tax jurisdictions. So in the example you gave where you have somebody in the so

a client in Ireland, a client in the UK, or we have a partner network,

so we will be able to actually pass that data to the a a

partner firm in the UK for them to get their expertise from it. At

the moment, it would seem as though or another example would be you just decide

to move from Ireland and go to Portugal. So now what would happen is you

may introduce them to a partner firm in Portugal, but then the whole process will

start again. You go, okay. So what is your background? Where have you been? And

we can now condense this by having this sort of this body of evidence that

can just be accessed by the new partner firm, and you can have a more

seamless sort of transition from one firm to another, which we think can be quite

attractive. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. What do

you envisage? What what what are your hopes for this? Do you see this as

being something that's, you know, European wide? Is this is this a

global app, or is the sky the limit at the moment? It's to be

decided. Yeah. Definitely a global app. We're starting in Jersey

and Ireland on a sort of small scale and rolling things out there really just

to make sure the customer experience is as good as it possibly can be in

understanding some of the concerns, issues. You know, we're talking about quite

sensitive data, so we need to have just from a sort of a communications

perspective and explaining and storytelling perspective what what's going on with

this thing. So we wanna work really closely with our partner firms and their clients

to really understand the issues. But once we've done that, we can then scale that

globally. You know, fundamentally, the way the app is built is that we could just

import tax legislation to it, find a partner firm, let's say, in

Portugal, who says, yep. These are the rules that you you've interpreted

them. This is our interpretation of them most importantly, and we can adjust them

subtly if that's the case because some of them are gray areas. And, then we've

got a rule set that we know is robust for for for Portugal, for example,

and that can be done all over the world. So, yeah, the the the sky

is, the limit in many ways. The the pilot in me, the

the the skeptical one, wants to be, sure

that high net worth individuals are gonna have this on their phone and use it.

And that's that's gonna take my cynical mind quite some time to be convinced

of that, before I get too excited about how how big it could get. I

think the main concern people would have, and I know we've spoken about this

previously. So firstly, how do people know that the data that they

share is safe? Because I don't particularly enjoy when

Google timeline tells me where I was. I feel it's intrusive. Tell

me what you see as being able to kind of

reassure people that this isn't gonna be some kind of a way for someone else

to look over their shoulder unless they've actually given them access. Yeah.

So all of the data's encrypted. That's sort of standard stuff these days. So, and

it's also, decoupled from the identity of the person. So if

if there was a a data breach, for example, that's designed so that it makes

no sense. It's completely useless to anybody, and that's fairly standard in software these days.

So there's sort of the industry standards and the company who, or developers

have worked in financial services applications for many years. So we've

got a robust and a good expertise in in creating that

itself. Ultimately, if you were to, give your

password away for your phone, and, of course, anyone can access it and anyone can

see anything that's on there. But if you don't do that, then it's for your

eyes only. Just in the same way that you don't have to share any data

currently that you don't want to. It can be, you know, you you share what

you want with your adviser. And and so there's that sort of level of security

is entirely up to you what you do with it. You are your the the

data is yours and we are the guardians of that data. Mhmm. But it could

come down to a very granular piece of evidence that you need to

make sure that you didn't exceed 90 days in UK, which might be

the argument. And where you were fundamentally on that day and what you were doing

on that day could be absolutely critical as we know from from previous text investigations.

And in terms of, I suppose what you see the usage

of the app looking like looking like you mentioned earlier that it will

register commercial addresses, for example, as you ping

close to them. So let's say, let's give an example. We have a

client who maybe has traveled from Ireland to

Gatwick and they spend 2 weeks working

in the UK. Just talk me through what you think they're going to

need to do in terms of the app. How many times do they need to

pick their phone up and actually click into this app to get what

they need from us for the black box? So the answer to that is is

really down to the individual. That's entirely up to them. They could do nothing with

it. It could sit in their pocket. And as long as they have the location

services enabled, then we'll just count days wherever the phone goes. But as we said,

that only proves where the phone was, which is, you know, not the best, in

terms of evidencing. So, for example, then what would be fairly

standard is you arrive at the airport in, let's say, Dublin, going to the UK,

and, you would upload your boarding pass, take a photo of yourself

in the airport or the airport itself. That would show that you had left

Ireland. And then when you arrive in the UK, you could add a photo

of something in the UK. A receipt would be absolutely fine as well because that

shows that you're making a bank transaction at a coffee shop in London, for example.

And really it just goes from there. It's entirely up to you how much you

use it. The more that you do, the better the evidence will be. And in

fact, we we're working on an algorithm that will score that

risk or or evidential status, I suppose, the quality of the

data so that something on the road map is that we'll be able to say

to a tax authority, this guy's this guy's a 8.7. Do you really wanna

investigate too much because all the data's there? I mean, does this really represent a

genuine risk of noncompliance? And and so what we hope for that will

be it'll be a deterrent that will enable tax authorities to sort of

deploy their dwindling resources, on genuine risks of noncompliance and

not just sort of randomly scattergun approach hoping that if they just keep digging long

enough, they'll find something, which doesn't seem like a very good use of anyone's time

and is incredibly expensive and stressful for those involved. Is that a common

thing to see from a UK perspective? I can comment from an Irish perspective,

but is it common to see HMRC going down that digging group

where they're challenging, not very robust evidence?

It it seems to be. So anecdotally, what we're told by our

partners who've sort of experienced in in this particular ones looking in after the

contentious tax, sort of experts. Yeah, there is. I mean, we've

got one story where it came down to, you know, after about 3 years of

of probing as to how many days did you spend in the UK and the

allegation that that exceeded that, it came to, well, where was your private jet? Was

it inside or outside of UK airspace at midnight? Which was a very sort of

binary event. It's either is or it isn't. So you either owe the tax, you

don't owe the tax. And that was incredibly difficult to go and get, you know,

since 15 years ago, trying to get radar reports to find out where the aircraft

was. And that's fine. That is the law where you if you were inside, you

do owe it. But it's the process and and the time that it took to

keep getting to that level was really difficult. And and quite often, there isn't any

tax to pay. And all that's happened is you've been paying 100 of pounds an

hour to be represented. And it's a huge waste of the tax

authority's time going after somebody when if you have this

contemporaneous body of digital evidence, which is robust and you can

quickly show them, they can be satisfied that this person has a sort of

exemplary posture towards their tax and tax obligations, and and their time is

probably better spent elsewhere. So our clients are only people who wish to be

good. Of course. If you wanna gain the system, but they're not that's not for

us. No. No. No. Of course. And I think yeah. I mean,

from our perspective, it's difficult to communicate to clients

sometimes just how tedious it can be to deal with

revenue. Frankly, when we get into these kind of back and forth, it can go

on for months months. It can, you know, it, it can take time to get

a reply. So so you're entirely right, you know, even if it's a

favorable outcome for the client, it's not gonna be a favorable outcome for their

pocket because obviously somebody has to deal with this, whether it's often clients

say to us that they try initially to deal with them, the situation and they

just run out of energy or knowledge and then they come to us.

So I think you're entirely right even if the answer is well there's no tax

and there never was being able to you know shortcut

that process and just go well look here's the report, it's

invaluable. I think there's probably lots of people listening to this

and and from an Irish perspective I'm looking forward to seeing the app go live

soon which I know it is and it's, it's something

that we've been involved with at Expat Taxes. I see that there

will be lots of people who are planning a move to Ireland or

who maybe spend time in Ireland as well as in other

jurisdictions, with an eye on when their tax residency is gonna be

triggered and I really see that they're gonna be keen to learn

more about the app. Tell people who are listening who want to learn

a bit more about you and the team where they can find

the information, if you don't mind. Yeah. Sure. So you can find us at daisyum.com.

That's d a y s I u m.com. That's our website

there. And, you can sign up and join the wait list. So we've we've got

an increasing or increases by numbers on a daily basis at the moment from all

parts of the world of people who are interested in in getting there. As I

mentioned, we're trying to do this in a very structured way. So, the demand

is high, but we wanna make sure that everyone has a good experience with it.

So you can join the waitlist, and we'll get you as soon as we can.

Currently, we're just onboarding through partner firms. So if you're happen to be listening

and you're a accountant or tax adviser, then you can also, through the

website, apply to become a partner. And, yeah, we can have

a chat and see if that might be a good fit. Mhmm. Well, it's really

exciting. It's really exciting. I think, our clients and,

others alike who listen to the podcast are gonna hear lots more about ACM as

things progress and, we feel very lucky that Ireland is one of the first

places it's being rolled out because you know we really see this shift where

and we really try to be at the forefront of it insofar as possible where

we kind of you know digitalize whatever we can

And ultimately I think, you know, the the days of having a paper

diary or an Excel spreadsheet to document anything you do in

life, they're they're leaving us so what I see

this as is you know reducing stress for people giving them clarity

and essentially saving them money if a question ever

comes, it's, it's probably difficult to quantify just how much of a stress

reliever and cost saver this, this technology could be.

So thank you so much for explaining more about it and look forward to hearing

more as as the app is rolled out. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, thanks for having

me on the podcast and, it was great to talk about it. Brilliant. Thanks, Tim.

Thanks for listening to Taxbytes for Expats. Please do leave a

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