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Tax forms, contracting model, payment terms, insurance status, entity status and continuity — the questions procurement asks before an engagement can start.
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Onboarding an individual contractor in another country is mostly a document exercise, and most of the delay in it comes from questions being asked one at a time over a week. This page answers them in one place so your procurement, finance and legal functions can work in parallel instead of in sequence.
Two of the answers below are no. They are stated as plainly as the rest, because a vendor who is vague about what they lack is a vendor whose other answers stop being worth checking.
An individual contractor, tax-resident in Nepal, working remotely and delivering fixed-scope statements of work into your own repositories and infrastructure. No US or EU entity, so no employer-of-record is required: a services agreement, a W-8BEN, an invoice and an international transfer is the whole arrangement, with those four documents on your file.
Work is quoted and delivered as a scoped deliverable rather than as hours. Where your intake form requires an hourly figure, one is supplied — but the engagement itself is governed by the statement of work, which is what both sides actually want to be arguing about if something changes.
No insurance is currently in force. If your contract template requires a certificate of insurance — typically general liability, professional indemnity and cyber, on an ACORD 25 naming you as additional insured — raise it in your first message. Whether a policy placed outside the United States can satisfy an admitted-carrier and A.M. Best rating clause is a real question with a real answer, and it needs resolving before a statement of work rather than during one.
There is no registered company. Contracting is with an individual. This matters in two specific places and is otherwise cosmetic: California's AB5 business-to-business exemption cannot be satisfied by a contract with a natural person, and many enterprise contingent- labour programmes default individuals to an agent-of-record rather than direct engagement. If either applies to you, an AOR arrangement is workable and is the normal path.
Coupa, Tipalti and equivalent self-onboarding portals are fine. SAP Ariba is workable but becomes chargeable to the supplier past a document and volume threshold, which is worth naming in commercial terms rather than absorbing quietly. SAP Fieldglass and similar vendor-management systems cannot be self-registered into — access follows from a commercial relationship your own team or MSP initiates, and a statement-of-work engagement often sits outside the contingent-labour programme entirely. Subcontracting through a supplier you have already onboarded is also a normal answer, and sometimes the fastest one.
The fields a supplier record wants, in the order an intake form usually asks for them.
No registered company. Relevant to AB5 business-to-business exemptions and to contingent-labour programmes that route individuals through an agent of record.
Treaty-benefits section left blank — there is no US–Nepal income tax treaty. Services are performed outside the US, so the income is foreign-source.
If your contract template requires a certificate of insurance, raise it in the first message. It changes the timeline and has to be settled before a statement of work.
A purchase-order number quoted on the invoice avoids the single most common cause of an AP rejection.
Written responses are returned inside this window. Proposals are scoped, not templated.
No client has yet consented to act as a named referee. Rather than publish a substitute, this says so.
What happens to your project if the one person delivering it becomes unavailable. These are operative commitments, written this way because procurement can process a clause and cannot process a reassurance.
Each of these is a round trip if it is not published. None of them is confidential.
W-8BEN, as a foreign individual. Services are performed entirely outside the United States, which makes the income foreign-source: no 30% FDAP withholding applies, no Form 1042-S is issued, and no 1099 is due (1099s are issued to US persons). The treaty-benefits section is left blank because there is no US–Nepal income tax treaty. If any days are worked physically inside the US, that portion becomes US-source and is treated separately.
No VAT is charged. B2B services are taxed where the customer is established, and the customer self-accounts under the reverse charge. Invoices show 0% VAT with the reverse-charge reference and your VAT number.
Yes. Send the PO number before the first invoice and it is quoted on every invoice for the engagement. Invoices without a PO number are rejected by most AP functions, so this is worth settling before work starts rather than at billing.
No. The DOJ bulk sensitive data rule (28 CFR Part 202) lists China including Hong Kong and Macau, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela. Nepal is not a listed country. This is usually the regulation behind a general "offshore contractor" objection, so it is worth resolving explicitly rather than in the abstract.
Not possible. ITAR and EAR deemed-export rules mean a foreign person may not access controlled technical data without a licence. Defence, aerospace and some federal-adjacent programmes are closed regardless of paperwork, and it is cheaper for both of us to establish that in the first conversation.
Yes, and your paper is preferred over mine. Where personal data of EU or UK subjects is involved, the 2021 Standard Contractual Clauses apply — Nepal has no adequacy decision — together with a transfer impact assessment. Most engagements can be scoped so that no personal data is processed at all, which is a shorter conversation than either.
Yes, where you use one. Coupa Supplier Portal is free to suppliers and its actionable notifications allow invoicing against a PO from the email itself. Tipalti self-onboarding is supported. SAP Ariba is workable but becomes chargeable to the supplier past a volume threshold, so it is worth naming in the commercial terms rather than absorbing silently.
International bank transfer to Nepal, typically one to five business days once released, with the usual wire and FX costs. Nepal has been on the FATF grey list since February 2025, which does not block payment but does mean transfers can sit in a compliance queue that a domestic supplier would not encounter. This is built into quoted terms rather than discovered at the first invoice.
Security review material — access model, subprocessors and implemented controls — is on /security. What an engagement looks like for a team rather than a founder is on /teams.
Send the question rather than the whole questionnaire first — most of what a review needs is on this page, and the remainder is usually two or three specifics. Written questions get a reply within 4 hours; a completed questionnaire comes back separately, on its own timeline.
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