Why this page exists
Tax, residency and company-formation content is what Google calls "Your Money or Your Life" — content where errors can cause real financial, legal or wellbeing harm. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than the typical affiliate review site, and we publish that standard so readers can hold us to it.
If you find a page that does not meet what this document promises, please write to hello@soveraine.com. Concrete examples are far more useful than general complaints, and we will respond.
Sourcing
For any factual claim about tax law, residency rules, company-formation requirements or fees:
- We cite primary sources by preference: tax-authority pages, statutes, IRS or HMRC publications, EU directives, OECD model conventions, government immigration pages, the formation agent's own published price page.
- Secondary sources — Big Four publications, established tax-news outlets, published academic work — are used where they consolidate or interpret primary law, and are named.
- Other affiliate blogs are not cited as factual sources. They are sometimes referenced where they disagree with us and we want to address the disagreement openly, but they are not the basis for a factual claim.
- "Industry knowledge" is not a citation. If a claim cannot be sourced, it does not appear as fact; it is either rewritten as opinion ("in our experience…") or removed.
Prices, fees, commissions and tax rates published on Soveraine are dated. They reflect the position as of the article's most recent "Updated" date and are not retroactively adjusted; instead, the page is republished with a new date.
How we rank services
Where we publish a comparison or "best of" list, the ranking reflects a documented editorial assessment, not the commission rate paid to Soveraine. The assessment is based on:
- Whether the service can actually do what it claims for the reader profile in question (e.g. can a non-US-resident realistically open a US business bank account through it, or are they likely to be rejected).
- All-in cost, including the parts that the headline price hides — annual renewals, registered-agent fees, accounting add-ons, currency conversion costs.
- Quality of customer support, judged through documented test interactions or substantial reviewer reports.
- Transparency of pricing and terms.
- Compliance posture — whether the service genuinely follows the rules of the jurisdiction it operates in.
- Our own first-hand experience, where we have it.
Where two services are close, we say so and explain the trade-off rather than forcing an artificial ranking. Where we have not personally used a service, that limitation is stated at the top of the review.
Conflicts of interest
Affiliate commissions are a conflict of interest. Pretending they are not, or burying the disclosure on a separate page, is dishonest. We instead:
- Disclose the affiliate relationship on every page that contains affiliate links, close to the links themselves, and in the persistent disclosure bar at the top of the site.
- Refuse "pay-to-play" placements and sponsored rankings. Editorial coverage is never sold.
- Disclose any other financial relationships (paid speaking, equity holdings, advisory roles) on the relevant article, where they exist. At the time of writing, we hold no such positions.
- Publish a critical or negative review of a service that pays us a commission where the evidence justifies it. The test is whether the assessment is what we would publish if no commission existed.
Updates and corrections
Tax and residency rules change. So do fees and product features. Every article is reviewed at least annually, and earlier than that when a known change has happened — for example, the introduction of UAE corporate tax in 2023, or the regime that succeeded GILTI from 2026 in the United States. The "Updated" date at the top of each article is the genuine date of the last substantive review, not a date refreshed automatically by the CMS.
When we correct a published article:
- A factual correction is logged in a brief "Corrections" note at the bottom of the article, with the date and a short description of what changed.
- For substantive corrections (a wrong tax rate, a wrong eligibility rule, a wrongly described tax treatment), we note the correction prominently rather than silently editing the page.
- Where a correction came from a reader, we credit them by name and link, unless they ask us not to.
AI use
We use AI tools to assist with editing, summarisation, research-question generation and routine copy improvement. We do not publish AI-generated articles. Every published article is written, fact-checked and signed off by a named human author. Where a human reviewer has further checked the article for tax-technical accuracy, that reviewer is also named.
Anonymous sources
We rarely rely on anonymous sources, because most of the material on Soveraine is documentable from public records. Where we do — for example, a former employee of a formation agent describing internal practices — we state that the source is anonymous, explain why anonymity was granted, and require corroboration from at least one other independent source or document before publishing.
Independence
Soveraine has no parent company, no investor demanding a particular editorial line, and no government, political party or advocacy group behind it. The editorial decisions on the site are taken by the editorial team named on the about page.