I used a numbered company for holding shares in a previous employer; at my current company I hold them personally. A few things to think about:
- Are you likely to own more than 10% of the company? In that case there might be some advantage to using a numbered company under current tax rules. Basically your numbered company wouldn't pay tax on dividends since it would be considered a related company. I used this approach to re-invest my dividends in my employer. There would still be tax implications when you remove money from the numbered company.
- Do you have a spouse in a lower tax bracket? If you have family members with different classes of shares you can potentially use it as a form of income splitting by issuing dividends to the class of shares your spouse has. I'm not sure how the upcoming tax changes will affect the ability to do that though.
If neither of those are the case, you're probably better off holding shares individually due to the costs of the numbered company - legal costs, annual accounting costs for taxes, fees for having a corporate bank account, etc.
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