Last updated: September 23, 2026
A large share of the compliance work we do isn't for brand-new companies - it's for companies whose original consultant issued the licence and then effectively disappeared. If any of the following sound familiar, it's worth a second opinion.
1. You can't remember the last time they contacted you
Proactive compliance means someone tells you a deadline is coming before it arrives, not after. If the only contact you've had since incorporation is when you chased them, that's not a compliance relationship - it's a one-time transaction that happened to include a follow-up email address.
2. A renewal or filing notice caught you by surprise
Licence renewals, VAT periods, and Corporate Tax deadlines are all predictable in advance. Finding out about one from a penalty notice, rather than a heads-up weeks earlier, means nobody was actually tracking your calendar.
3. Nobody has reassessed your Qualifying Free Zone Person status
This one is easy to miss because it doesn't generate an obvious deadline - QFZP status has to be reassessed annually against your actual income, not assumed to hold indefinitely from your first year. If this has never come up in a conversation with your current provider, it likely hasn't been checked.
4. Your VAT return was filed late, or not at all
This is usually the clearest signal, because it's the most visible failure. A missed VAT filing is rarely a one-off - it's typically a symptom of nobody actively managing your filing calendar.
5. You've started Googling the answers yourself
If you're the one researching your own compliance obligations because asking your consultant doesn't get a useful answer, that's the clearest sign of all.
What to check before you switch
Before approaching a new provider, it's worth pulling together what you can find - it speeds up the handover and gives the new team an honest starting point rather than a guess. At minimum: your trade licence and Memorandum of Association, the last filed VAT returns (or confirmation none have been filed), your UBO register as it currently stands, and any correspondence from the FTA or your free zone authority about outstanding items. If you can't locate some of this, that's useful information in itself - it usually means the first job for a new provider is reconstructing your compliance history before building anything forward.
What switching actually involves
Much of our ongoing compliance and audit work is exactly this - picking up companies mid-operation, reconstructing what's actually been filed, and building a calendar going forward. In practice it follows a fairly consistent pattern: a review of your licence, filings, and UBO register to establish where things actually stand; a gap check against what should have been filed by now, including any Corporate Tax or VAT registration that may have been missed; and then a forward calendar built against your real renewal and filing dates, not a generic annual cycle. It's a more common request than most people expect, and it doesn't require re-incorporating anything - your existing licence and structure stay exactly as they are.
What it usually costs to catch up
Picking up a neglected company is rarely more expensive than starting fresh would have been, because the incorporation work is already done - what's being priced is the catch-up review and any overdue filings, not a new setup. The bigger cost, in our experience, is the one that's harder to see: penalties that accumulated while filings sat unfiled, or a licence renewal that got held up because an audit was never scheduled. Confirming where things actually stand early is what keeps a switch cheap rather than expensive.