PBC list management

A licence renewal, a tax deadline and an audit, all at once

A UAE statutory audit rarely has the calendar to itself. It often lands in the same weeks as a free zone trade licence renewal or a Corporate Tax filing deadline, and a request list that slips by even a few days can push all three. Working the PBC list early is as much about protecting the licence and the filing as it is about the audit.

Forty lines, forty different owners

A typical request list scatters across a bank portal, a free zone authority account, a signed lease, and a folder of board resolutions nobody has reopened since the meeting. A finance lead already mid-close has little appetite left to track down forty separate documents from forty separate places. Once your audit firm issues the list, we split it into named tasks against the engagement date and chase each one to whoever actually holds it.

The list keeps growing after fieldwork starts

New questions arrive once testing gets under way, usually with a short deadline attached. Anything factual, a missing statement, a reconciling entry, we answer directly. Anything resting on judgement, an estimate, a provision, a going-concern view, goes back to you first; nothing leaves our side without your say.

What carries over to next year

Items that took the longest to track down get noted in a closing summary, so next year's list starts from that record rather than a blank inbox. This work sits downstream of audit-ready books, since a schedule already tied out there often answers two or three list items before they are even asked.

When the request list spans more than one country

A holding structure with a UAE entity and operating companies in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain or Oman frequently faces more than one request list in the same season. We keep the UAE list moving on its own timeline and flag clearly where a document needs to come from a sister entity elsewhere in the group.