Intra-company transfer to Italy: moving your own people

A multinational moving its own people has a different problem from a company hiring locally. It is not recruiting from a labour market: it is relocating someone who already works for the group, often at short notice and for a defined period.

The intra-company transfer route answers that, and its decisive feature for planning is that it sits outside the annual quotas. No click day, no waiting for a decree. For an HR function that has to commit to a start date, that is the difference between planning and hoping.

Three categories, with different requirements and different maximum durations: managers, specialists and trainee employees.

Common to all is prior employment with the group for a minimum period before the transfer, and the existence of a genuine corporate relationship between the sending and receiving entities. The transfer is temporary by definition: it is not a route for permanent relocation, and treating it as one creates difficulties at the end of the assignment.

A further requirement often underestimated: 3 years within the previous 7 may be relevant where qualifications are assessed, and the documentation supporting the specialist or managerial character of the role is scrutinised rather than taken at face value.

This is where companies that have done everything right on immigration still end up exposed. Three distinct bodies of rules apply at once, and none of them follows from the others.

One of the route's real advantages: a transferee admitted in one member state may, under conditions, work at group entities in other member states without starting again from scratch.

The conditions and the notifications required vary, and they have to be handled before the movement rather than after. Where an assignment is genuinely European rather than Italian, structuring it with that in mind from the outset avoids a sequence of national applications.

We handle the immigration side and, where a company moves people regularly, we build it into a single procedure: one calendar on which the permit, the posting notification and the social security certificate sit together instead of being three separate things that surface one at a time.

The employment and social security filings are the employment consultant's and the accountant's work, and we work with professionals who handle international mobility. Tax treatment of the assignee is theirs too, and it is worth settling before the start date rather than at the first payroll run.