Compliance counsel · United Arab Emirates
Software tells you. We do it — and pay if we don't.
Every licence, visa, labour card and return your UAE companies depend on carries a date, and the penalty for missing one is fixed, automatic and indifferent to your reasons. We hold all of those dates in a single register, act on each before it falls due, and settle the penalty ourselves if we fail.
For founders, holding structures and family offices operating in the UAE without an in-house government relations function.
There are two ways to handle this badly, and everyone offers one of them
A wave of UAE compliance apps now tracks expiry dates competently, and a hundred business services firms will file anything you ask for. Both stop exactly where the risk begins. An app cannot file, and a firm you have to ask has no reason to watch. The date that lapses is always the one nobody was assigned.
The compliance app
Tracks your dates, scans your documents, sends the alert. Then hands the problem back. It holds no licence, files nothing on your behalf, and every provider states plainly that submission remains yours.
The services firm
Will process any renewal you instruct, competently and per errand. But the engagement begins when you make contact, so the calendar is still yours to keep — and it is invoiced by volume, not by outcome.
Emissaria
We hold the register, work it without being prompted, file what needs filing, and carry the cost of our own failure. One retainer, one named person, and a penalty guarantee written into the engagement.
This is not a criticism of software — we run it, and you will see it. It is a statement about where liability sits. A subscription tool cannot underwrite a government penalty, because it has no licence, no filing capability and no professional indemnity behind it. That is a promise only a firm can make, and almost no firm makes it.
The penalties are fixed. They do not scale to your intent.
UAE penalties are not discretionary and are rarely negotiated down. They attach to a missed date regardless of whether tax was owed, whether the lapse was clerical, or whether you were out of the country. This is the exposure a single mid-sized entity carries in an ordinary year.
| Obligation | If the date is missed | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate tax return, filed late or not at all | AED 10,000 | FTA |
| Wage Protection System non-compliance | Up to AED 50,000 + work permit ban |
MOHRE |
| Labour card renewal, per employee | AED 500 – 1,000 | MOHRE |
| Trade licence renewal, after grace period | AED 250 / month capped at AED 10,000 |
Licensing authority |
| Medical insurance lapsed at visa renewal | Visa not issued or renewed |
ICP |
Two traps catch experienced operators in particular. A Golden Visa holder still requires a valid labour card — the residency does not discharge the employer's obligation. And Small Business Relief is available only for tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2026, so a large cohort of companies will file a real corporate tax liability for the first time in 2027.
One register. One escalation ladder. A named person at the end of it.
Onboarding builds a complete register of every obligation your entities carry, in Arabic and English, reconciled against the licensing authority's own record rather than the copy in your drawer. From that point the register drives the work — not your inbox, and not a request from you.
The ladder, by obligation
Opens four months out, because the return cannot be prepared until the books are closed. The first request is for records, not signatures.
Medical screening and Emirates ID appointments alone consume three weeks and cannot be compressed. Ninety days is the honest lead time, not a cautious one.
Renewals fail on dependencies more often than on the renewal itself: an unrenewed tenancy registration blocks the licence, and a lapsed establishment card freezes every visa beneath it. We resolve the chain in order, not the item in isolation.
Priced per employee, so a lapse across a team compounds fast. Batched and filed together rather than one trip at a time.
If two notices have gone unanswered, we stop messaging and telephone the named signatory. We do not send a third notice and call it diligence.
Every notice carries the action rather than merely the news: the form prepared, the fee quantified, the decision reduced to one you can actually make from a phone. Notices go by WhatsApp and are mirrored to email, where the timestamped record lives.
Written into the engagement
If we miss a date on your file, we pay the penalty.
Not a service credit, not a discount on next quarter — the government penalty itself, settled by us. A guarantee is worth only what its exclusions leave standing, so ours are stated here rather than in a schedule you receive after signing.
- Liability is capped at three months of fees or AED 25,000 per engagement year, whichever is the lower.
- It applies where we failed to notify you, or failed to file on time after receiving complete documents and cleared government fees.
- It does not apply where documents were requested and not supplied by the stated deadline, or during a documented outage of a government portal. Where your float is funded, an unpaid government fee is never an exclusion — that is the point of holding one.
- Every notice is timestamped and retained, and you can read the full record of your own file at any time — including the parts that would be used against a claim.
We also pass through every government fee at cost, with the receipt attached. Marking up a federal charge is ordinary practice in this market and we think it is indefensible: our fee is our fee, and the authority's fee is the authority's.
What sits in the register
- Trade licence expiry
- Establishment card
- Immigration file and e-channel balance
- Tenancy registration
- Memorandum and share register
- Residence visa expiry
- Labour card and work permit
- Emirates ID
- Passport validity against renewal windows
- Medical insurance certificate
- Corporate tax registration and return
- Quarterly VAT 201 returns
- E-invoicing readiness and ASP appointment
- Small Business Relief eligibility
- Transfer pricing thresholds
- Wage Protection System cycle
- Ultimate beneficial owner register
- Economic substance filings
- Anti-money-laundering obligations, where applicable
- Bank know-your-customer review dates
Where an obligation requires a regulated licence we do not hold — acting as a registered tax agent, broking insurance, accrediting electronic invoices — we say so and instruct a licensed party on your behalf, remaining accountable for the timetable. We would rather name the limit than let you discover it.
A retainer for the watching, a unit price for the doing
Charging per errand rewards the provider for volume and leaves nobody paid to watch the calendar. Charging one bundled annual figure hides the government's fees inside ours. We do neither: a standing retainer covers the register and the guarantee, an allowance of work is included, and every government fee stays visible at cost.
For owners who file their own paperwork and need certainty about what is due, and when.
- Register built and maintained against authority records
- Full notice ladder by WhatsApp and email
- Forms prepared, fees quantified
- Quarterly standing review
- Filing and submission remain with you
- Guarantee covers notification only
Done for you. Renewals filed, returns submitted, counters attended, penalties guaranteed.
- Everything in Watch, executed on your behalf
- Licence, visa and labour card renewals filed
- Corporate tax and VAT returns submitted
- Wage Protection System monitored monthly
- Government fees drawn from your float, at cost
- Full penalty guarantee
Multiple entities, holding structures and family offices needing a single point of accountability.
- Consolidated register across every entity
- Named partner, reachable directly
- Golden Visa and long-term residency handled
- Quarterly compliance board pack
- Free zone, mainland and offshore in one view
- Counsel on structure before it becomes a filing
Terms of payment
Counted by outcome, not by errand
One visa renewed is one unit — not four, however many counters, medicals and appointments it takes us. A return filed is one unit. A licence renewed is one unit. You are never billed for our steps, only for your results, and the count is visible to you as it moves.
AED 150 per unit beyond the allowance A ten-person company typically uses 25 to 40 units a year
Government fees, funded in advance and held separately
Filings miss their dates more often because a fee went unfunded than for any other reason. So government fees are prepaid into an account held in your name, drawn down against receipts, with the balance visible at all times. It is your money: unspent balance is returned on request or at the end of the term.
Fees drawn at cost, never marked up Held separately from our operating account, and reconciled monthly
Two months free on twelve prepaid
Settle the year's retainer in advance and two months are free — roughly seventeen per cent. The discount applies to our retainer only. We do not discount a government fee, because it is not ours to discount, and a provider offering to would be doing it with a markup you cannot see.
AED 25,000 per entity, prepaid annually Against AED 30,000 billed monthly on the Manage retainer
You will find UAE compliance software from around AED 99 a month, and it is often good. It is also a different product: it tells you what is due and leaves the doing, the licence and the liability with you. If a dashboard is all you need, buy the dashboard — we will say so during the audit.
Every engagement opens with a compliance audit, AED 3,500 to AED 5,000 depending on entities and headcount. It is real work: we reconstruct the register from your existing documents and tell you what is already overdue before you commit to anything further.
Electronic invoicing is not optional, and the dates are already set
Ministerial Decisions 243 and 244 of 2025 establish the UAE electronic invoicing system and its phased implementation. Every in-scope business must route its invoices through an Accredited Service Provider. It is the largest forced change to UAE business administration in a decade, and it arrives on fixed dates.
Under AED 50 million you have until July 2027, which sounds generous and is not. This is a systems migration: your accounting software must emit a compliant document in the prescribed format, and every provider in the country will be booked solid in the final quarter. We audit readiness now and schedule the migration while there is still a choice of dates.
Request a compliance audit
Tell us what you hold and we will tell you what is due. The audit reconstructs your register from existing documents and returns a dated list of every obligation across your entities — including anything already overdue.
We reply within one business day, from a named person rather than a queue. If your position is straightforward and you would be better served handling it yourself, we will tell you that instead.
Or write directly
[ enquiries@emissaria.com ]
Questions we are asked before signing
How is this different from the UAE compliance apps?
They track; we act. The good ones read your documents, reconcile against the registry and alert you well in advance — and then the filing, the queue and the penalty are still yours. Every one of them states in its own terms that it is not a licensed agent and does not submit on your behalf. We use software of that kind ourselves. The difference is that when the date arrives, a person here is accountable for it and the firm is financially exposed to the outcome.
Do you replace our existing PRO, or work alongside them?
Either. On Watch we build and run the register while your existing provider continues to file, which usually reveals what was being missed. On Manage we take the filing as well. Many engagements begin as the former and convert within a quarter.
Why do you hold our government fees in advance?
Because the most common reason a filing misses its date is not negligence, it is an unfunded fee sitting in an approval queue while the deadline passes. A funded float removes that failure mode entirely, which is why it also removes the corresponding exclusion from our guarantee. The float is held in an account in your name, separate from our operating money, drawn down only against receipts, reconciled monthly and returned on request. We earn nothing on it beyond our stated retainer.
Why is the guarantee capped?
Because an uncapped guarantee is not a guarantee, it is a promise that fails at the moment it matters. A single Wage Protection System breach can reach AED 50,000. Anyone offering unlimited cover on a AED 2,500 retainer has either not read the penalty schedule or does not intend to pay. We would rather state a number we will honour.
Where is our data held?
Passports, Emirates IDs and corporate records sit in an encrypted vault, retained for the statutory period and processed in accordance with Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on personal data protection. We record the lawful basis for every contact and honour withdrawal of consent immediately, across every channel.
Will you cold-call us afterwards?
No. UAE law makes no exception for business-to-business marketing — unsolicited contact requires proven prior consent, and the regulator has issued millions of dirhams in fines and disconnected thousands of numbers for ignoring it. We contact you about what you asked us about, and nothing else.
Can you act before our company exists?
Yes, and it is the cheaper moment to involve us. Jurisdiction, licence activity and share structure determine the obligations you will carry for the life of the company, and several of them cannot be changed later without re-licensing.
What are you not licensed to do?
We are not a registered tax agent, an insurance broker, or an Accredited Service Provider for electronic invoicing. Each is a regulated status with its own authority and its own capital requirements. Where your matter needs one, we instruct a licensed party and stay accountable for the timetable.