Hedge Fund Audit Risk and Foreign Nationals

Sum2 is conducting a study to determine fund management industry awareness and preparedness to address recent IRS initiatives concerning the use of Industry Focus Issues (IFI) to guide agency field engagements.

The survey can be accessed here: IRS Audit Risk Survey for Hedge Funds

Sum2 asked industry participants to take part in the survey that were not domiciled in the US. Though the IRS is not the national tax authority for fund managers located outside of the US the audit guidelines that the agency is developing has a high focus on foreign nationals investing in funds with a US nexus. This has implications for any individuals, institutions and subscribers to fund of funds regardless of their nationality. The IRS has developed three tiers of IFI that relate to the investment management industry and four (4 ) of the fourteen (14) First Tier IFI concerns foreign nationals participation in US domiciled partnerships. The IFI risk profiling that will guide agency field agents examination of investment partnerships and other fund structures will impact all partners in a investment fund corporation.

The duration of the survey will be four weeks. Sum2 will be releasing interim weekly results of the survey. The first interim update will be released later today. So far respondents of the survey have indicated an extremely low level of awareness about the IFI and its potential impact on fund partnerships.

One of the goals of the survey was to create visibility for our new IRS Audit Risk Program (IARP) product. In future releases of the product, we plan to incorporate other tax domiciles.

We encourage all global participants to review the survey to determine how it may impact their fund management business.

We also welcome any comments or insights from industry participants about how IFI may impact their investment fund partnerships company's and how Sum2's IARP can be improved to help investment partnerships more effectively mitigate and manage audit tax risk.

In particular we welcome insights and intelligence on EU market application and best practices guidelines industry participants employ to monitor and manage tax audit threats. As with all risk management products, there is a lot of interest in the IARP product in the United States.

We are looking forward to the release of subsequent additions of the IARP that speak to managing audit tax risk in other domiciles and tax jurisdictions.

We welcome your insights into initiatives or trends that impact the global fund management industry.

Thank you for your response.