When things go wrong – we fix them.
We deal with blocked bank accounts, ownership changes, compliance notices, employee disputes and payment routes that stopped working. The cause is usually in the company’s structure. We find what is broken and rebuild it with you.
Even ChatGPT knows what the law says.
So do the lawyers and accountants. The harder part is knowing the business side: which passports a bank will work with and on what conditions, and what makes the tax office look more closely at a company. You also need to know which decisions to make today to avoid problems that are not obvious in theory.
For over a decade we have taken our companies through all of it – incorporation, banking, compliance, payments, hiring, restructuring – and we did it with complicated passports. That’s why we’re confident enough to suggest you talk to several service providers and compare the answers.
What we handle
Find your situation.
The details differ, but each one usually has a cause that can be fixed.
Banking and payment problems
- “The bank won’t open an account for my company.”
- “My bank closed the account.”
- “My business can’t send or receive payments where it needs to.”
Roman Verzin, USG’s founder, runs several businesses across countries – international consulting, B2C in Singapore, sourcing in China, and a consumer brand he is now launching in Europe. A Russian passport is today one of the hardest passports for international business (see the passport-tier matrix here →). So the banking solutions we recommend are ones we tested in those businesses before using them with 70+ active clients.
Ownership problems
- “My co-founder is leaving the business.”
- “We’re bringing in a new shareholder.”
- “We used a nominee owner and they got into trouble.”
- “I don’t want to use a nominee but I have a high-risk passport.”
When a partner leaves or shares are transferred, a wrong decision can cost you the company. We have helped clients in China and Hong Kong through these changes, and handled a partner’s exit in one of our companies. Our core expertise isn’t telling you to find a nominee; it’s the opposite – making sure that even with a complicated passport you can build a legal, durable business of your own.
China VAT refund problems
- “We opened a WFOE and it can’t get a VAT refund.”
- “Our product is special and it’s hard to get a VAT refund – so we’re losing 13%.”
Before it pays an export VAT refund, the tax bureau checks the company: it looks for a physical office and for employees with social insurance, and a virtual office often fails that check. It also treats a claim made right after the first shipment with suspicion. We’ve set the refund mechanism up for our own China operations and help our China clients run the full process. And we’ve seen cases where the refund should have worked but didn’t – so we know what to avoid.
Employment and HR problems
- “I need to terminate a manager in China – but she’s pregnant.”
- “A director won’t cooperate and won’t step down.”
- “An employee is filing a complaint.”
- “I’m paying my employees, and now the accountants say I owe extra tax on top.”
We employ people in several countries and have dealt with unusual employment cases. Roman himself faced a termination case involving a pregnant employee in a Chinese company, and the client whose director refused to step down is in the “Director dispute” case below. China termination law leaves little room for mistakes. In Hong Kong mistakes surface when the IRD sends a query or an employee files a complaint. In Singapore the employer pays a mandatory CPF contribution on top of each local employee’s salary, and a director’s fee is taxed in Singapore even when the director lives abroad. All of these problems have answers – as long as you don’t improvise, or at least improvise with someone who knows the local rules.
Legal and compliance problems
- “We missed a deadline.”
- “Our goods are stuck in customs.”
- “The bank’s compliance team is asking for documents I don’t have.”
- “Something looks irregular and I need to know how bad it is.”
- “I need to close the company.”
- “Wait – were we supposed to be paying for a company secretary and registered address?”
Most of our clients, like us, don’t hold passports that banks and regulators trust by default. So everything we do has to be cleaner and better documented than it would need to be for a founder from France or Australia. After more than ten years this is a habit, and we work the same way when you have missed a deadline or a bank asks for documents you don’t have.
LatAm trader · from three refusals to two open accounts
European-passport founders in LatAm-connected minerals trade. Their Hong Kong company had an account closed in 2025. The trigger sat outside the company: their corporate-secretary provider hosted a sanctioned entity at the same registered address. Three later bank applications were refused. Ownership sat 50/50 between two founders with high-risk birthplaces, and the founders’ addresses on the company’s public file still pointed to a high-risk country even though both had lived in Europe for years.
A profile audit found the real reasons the bank had acted on. We consolidated ownership to the single founder and updated the director’s address to his European country of residence, then moved the registered office to a clean provider. From there we rebuilt the application from scratch and matched the case to several banks based in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Two banks moved the founders to onboarding. Three weeks to fix the profile, three weeks to prepare for the trip to China and open the accounts in person.
Cyprus owner · a director who turned his exit into a standoff
A Hong Kong company owned by a founder in Cyprus and run day to day by a director from the MENA region who lived in Asia. The director did not perform well enough, so the owner moved to replace him. The director turned the exit into a fight, demanding a large payout to step down, and betting that an owner who was not close to Hong Kong law and operations would simply pay to make it go away.
It started with a series of sessions for the owner on how Hong Kong works: law, business norms, risks, and options. Then we went into the company itself and mapped the director’s exposures and the mistakes the owner could use at the negotiating table. The conflict moved from a standoff toward an agreement.
The director handed his powers back voluntarily, on terms acceptable to the owner.
High-barrier-country founder · a contractor filed the company at a loss instead of claiming the offshore exemption
A founder from a high-barrier country came to us after his Hong Kong company’s first year had already been filed by a China-based contractor. The contractor had taken the standard local shortcut – booking the company at a loss so the tax came to zero – instead of claiming Hong Kong’s offshore exemption, the proper route for a business whose operations all sat outside Hong Kong. The offshore route takes more work and more knowledge of the rules; the loss was simply the easier thing to file.
First we moved the company onto our own infrastructure – our registered address and our corporate secretary – so the file was clean and consistent. The following year we did it properly. We prepared the full offshore-exemption package and the evidence that the business operates entirely outside Hong Kong, then filed the claim on grounds the IRD could accept.
The company went from a paper loss that no one could call a sustainable business to a proper offshore-exemption filing built on real substance.
Common questions
Handing a case over to us
Can you take over from a provider I’m already working with?
Yes – handovers are routine. We read the file, talk to your existing provider where useful, and pick up from where the work stands. If the prior work has gaps that affect what comes next, we tell you before we charge for anything, because sometimes that work has to be fixed first.
How do we start?
We set up a call at a time that works for both sides, talk through your case, propose a solution, and once you confirm we begin. We have staff in different time zones and we work with you on messenger – so you’ll find us almost always reachable.
What if you take the case and can’t fix it?
We don’t promise an outcome we aren’t confident about. But sometimes we’ll propose a path and tell you that the result isn’t fully under our control. For example, no one can guarantee that the Hong Kong tax office will approve an offshore-status claim. If you decide to go ahead anyway and the result is negative, what we refund depends on the service: for some we return the fee in full; for others we tell you in advance which part of the fee can’t be returned.
When something goes wrong on our side, we fix it. Our previous corporate secretary once registered an unrelated company at the registered address our clients were using. A bank later found a problem with that company and flagged one of our clients at the same address. We moved every client’s registered address to a new provider at our own expense.
One call tells you what’s recoverable.
Whatever started the problem is where we begin, and the free 30-minute call is spent finding the cause.
Book a free 30-minute call →