BOI obligations after certification: a 36-month timeline

01Why they belong on one timeline

What we see is that almost no company sets out to breach its certificate conditions. The usual path to trouble runs like this: the team that handled the application breaks up, the certificate goes into a filing cabinet, and the conditions attached to it never become anyone's routine work. Two years later the business shifts and staff turn over, and nobody goes back to check the company against the certificate. By the time the annual report raises questions, three or four items are already out of line.

The job of this timeline is to turn one certificate into one table that has dates and named owners, kept somewhere management can see it rather than in a drawer in the finance office.

02What is on the timeline

Four groups of items sit on the timeline.

• Three countdowns that start on the date the certificate is issued: the import window for duty-free machinery, progress toward first revenue from the promoted activity, and the deadline for project construction and the start-of-operations inspection. All three start on the same day, but extensions have to be applied for separately, through three different channels.
• Two ongoing reporting duties: the quarterly project progress report during the construction period, covering land, buildings, machinery and first revenue, which stops once the start-of-operations approval is granted; and the annual report on company operating results, covering shareholder information, financial statements, the annual corporate income tax return, employment data and standard certifications, which applies to every certificate holder and never ends.
• One separate anchor on the tax side: the number of years and the cap for corporate income tax exemption run from the first day the promoted activity has revenue, not from the date the certificate is issued. This is the highest-risk box in the whole chain, so it gets a row of its own.
• A breakdown of the certificate conditions: general conditions and project-specific conditions listed one by one, each with three columns — when it has to be done, what evidence is needed, and who owns it.

03Being late costs more than a fine

A late or missed report reaches into your duty-free import rights. The duty-free channels for machinery and for raw materials get locked, and goods already at the port cannot be released. For a plant still installing equipment and still ramping up output, that hurts more than any fine.

There is a more serious layer. Under the relevant provisions of the Investment Promotion Act, continued failure to meet the promotion conditions or the reporting duties can trigger suspension or withdrawal of the promotion, together with clawback of the tax benefits already taken. The exposure is not "no more exemption from here on" — it is "the tax you did not pay over the past few years comes back". The longer it runs, the bigger it gets.

That is why BOI compliance cannot be run on a deal-with-it-when-it-happens basis. Clawback looks backwards. Find the problem in year three and you are making good three years of it.

04How to use the timeline

Enter the date your certificate was issued and the real dates for the three countdowns fall out of it. Then copy the project-specific conditions from the pages attached to your certificate into the breakdown table, one by one, and name an owner for each. After that, update actual progress against plan once a month, and start an extension assessment as soon as any line slips by more than two months, rather than waiting for the quarterly report to raise it.

One more thing: when the business changes, look at the certificate first. Changing products, changing processes, expanding capacity, disposing of equipment, changes in shareholding — run each of these past the certificate conditions before you act, and work out whether an amendment has to be applied for in advance. Applying in advance is a routine procedure. Being found out afterwards is a different matter.

Which specific conditions your own certificate carries, how much room is left before each red line, and whether there are past deviations that need putting right first — all of that has to be checked item by item against the certificate terms, the construction and procurement plan, and how the business is actually running. A review of this kind is usually done once in full by the advisory team, which produces the list and the remedial steps; the company then decides the order in which to deal with them.

• Do all three countdowns start on the certificate issue date?
• Does the annual operating results report ever stop?
• Does the corporate income tax exemption run from the certificate issue date?