Never a Dull Moment When on Short-Term Business Trip Assignments in Africa — a Personal Perspective of an International Assignment Tax Professional

by Bob Rothery, KPMG LLP, Washington D.C.
(KPMG LLP in the United States is a KPMG International member firm)

The following reflects the journal entries of an international assignment tax professional on his experiences while on two business-trip assignments in Africa. The article reflects his personal comments and thoughts based on his experiences and do not reflect the opinions of KPMG LLP or KPMG International.

Arriving for My Assignment: Angola

My flight was due into Luanda, Angola, at 4:30 a.m., and I was apprehensive. I had e-mailed my itinerary to my client — let's call them GlobalCo — and I received an acknowledgement, but some details were lacking. How would I be met? Where would I be staying? I assumed I'd be met by a driver who would know where to take me.

The flight landed a little early, and I was nearly the first off the plane. Immigration waved me through, customs was just a formality, and I arrived with two bags and a computer case on the sidewalk of the tiny airport. There was some commotion as people arrived and met their rides — but there seemed to be no ride for me. No one wearing GlobalCo's famous logo, no one holding my name out on a card, no one waiting and scanning the arriving passengers like he was expecting someone (me) looking for him. So I stood, not sure what to do, in the steamy equatorial night.

Time passed. I hoped that because my plane was early, my ride was perhaps late, and soon enough someone would arrive. But the bulk of a 747-load of passengers filed past me, piled into busses, jeeps, cars, and scooters, and disappeared into the dark. I cursed my airline, whose business-class representatives in Paris had insisted on doing me the service of wrapping my luggage in plastic. It had seemed a reasonable precaution against theft, but now, standing on the curb, I felt very conspicuous, and my crinkly luggage, I feared, made me look the more a novice. I waited 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, then 45 minutes; and things began to quiet. The army guards with their machine guns eyed me curiously. I looked around for a phone, but I had no local money, and in any event I wouldn't know whom to call.

I had to make a decision — was it safer to stand alone in the night as the last people filed away, or to ask a stranger for a ride? Across the parking lot was an SUV, looking very white and clean, with the name of a limo service on its door, and a driver in a starched white shirt. I had been watching him, the only thing that looked like a cab, for some time, assumed that he was waiting for someone, but now I decided to act before it was too late. I crossed the dirt parking lot with my bags on their creaky trolley.

The driver looked at me curiously. I asked him if he spoke English — no, only Portuguese. In my rusty college Spanish I asked if he could take me to the Hotel Tropico — luckily, this was my second trip to Luanda, and I remembered the name of the hotel. The driver told me he would charge me $20, and I agreed. Just then another man walked up, an older, apparently European gentleman, with no luggage but well dressed, and in Portuguese he seemed to be asking me where I was going. In Spanish I told him that I didn't speak Portuguese, and in Italian he asked me if he could share the ride.

On the way, my fellow passenger chatted with the Angolan driver in Portuguese. After some time, we entered the city, and soon enough I recognized the hotel on the other side of the divided road. The car pulled over, the old man said he lived near by, pressed a $10 bill in my hand, and jumped out of the car. He disappeared into the night as the car pulled away.

My relief at being near the hotel disappeared when the car passed it and kept going. And going, and going, for what felt like a mile. My heart began to pound — at what point would it be clear that I was being kidnapped, not unheard of in some countries in Western Africa. But the car rounded a traffic circle, doubled back and soon I was at the hotel. I gave the driver $20, then another $5 as a grateful tip, and found myself in the bright air-conditioned haven of the hotel lobby.

Arriving for My Assignment: Nigeria

As I prepared to go to Nigeria the following year, I realized that my Angolan reception — lack of a reception — had been more traumatic than I had wanted to admit. And as the day approached, I found I was dreading arriving in Nigeria.

I had been to Nigeria, but on the previous trip I had arrived with my boss, an old hand, a charismatic Cajun whom nothing fazes, and when the pushing and shoving had started at immigration, he just pushed and shoved back. He stood behind me and almost inaudibly coached me — "Push up to the desk, Bob. Hand them your passport. Make them take it. Don't let anyone get in front of you." And when we emerged into the baggage area, there was a GlobalCo representative who saw us through customs, helped us run the gauntlet of cabbies and hawkers, money changers and beggars, and other assorted humanity, who lined the sidewalk. The GlobalCo representative ushered us into a van that took us to the company compound, accompanied by armed guards.

This time, I had to assume it would be no different, but I was arriving by myself. We had made it clear to our GlobalCo contacts that I would be arriving separately, on the 6:30 pm flight from London, two hours before my boss arrived on another flight coming from Johannesburg. As I said, I had been to Nigeria before, I knew what to expect. What could go wrong?

Immigration was a breeze. No pushing, no shoving, no shouting. A gracious Nigerian woman examined my visa, an old man stamped it, and I mumbled "ese pupa," ("thank you" in Yoruba). I was in the baggage area, thick with people from the last flight, but no evidence of anyone from GlobalCo.

I tried not to be conspicuous. I waited for the carousel to start. I strolled the length and width of the area, trying to see everyone's badge. Air France, British Airways, Nigerian Government, Lagos State, various American companies, but no one from GlobalCo. The room became crowded with people from my flight. Finally the carousel lurched to a start. Outside, lightning began to flash, and several times, the airport went dark. The lights came back up quickly, but it took about five minutes each time for the carousel to re-start. It was an hour before I had my luggage.

I stood on an alcove overlooking the area. My new cell phone, which I had bought partly on the promise that it would work in Nigeria, didn't work — I had made a point of bringing with me the number of my GlobalCo Nigeria contact. Finally I decided to go through customs to the last insulating area between me and the sidewalk. My heart sank — still no GlobalCo representatives. If I pushed my way outside, I knew I could find my way to the car park — I have a great sense of direction, and once I've been somewhere, I can normally find it again. But the prospect of pushing my way through the crowds alone, an American businessman who looks unmistakably just as such — a mark, a walking wallet — didn't thrill me. I knew it would be hard to mask the look of alarm in my eyes, and what if there was no one from GlobalCo in the car park? What then?

There was an information desk in the customs area. As opposed to Angola, where Portuguese is the lingua franca, English is widely spoken in Nigeria, in a beautiful dialect with long open vowels. I asked the woman at the desk if she would call my GlobalCo representative for me. She looked at the number on the page, then said "Yes, I will call him, but first I will page GlobalCo."

She made a call, and about ten minutes later, the page was made, loud, clear, insistent, reassuring. Ten minutes after that, a GlobalCo representative appeared. My new friend at the information desk insisted on seeing his ID card — kidnapping of businessmen is a very real threat. The representative had me wait in the customs area — the car for the GlobalCo compound had already left, but another one would come soon. Soon after, two guys in GlobalCo jumpsuits knocked on the window. They had been there all along — if only I had had the nerve to walk out to the sidewalk. It turns out the manifest had been wrong, and despite our messages, I had been expected to arrive on the same flight as my boss. An hour later, he emerged from the baggage area, sympathy in his eyes. If he was seeing me, it meant I'd had another unfortunate adventure — another so-called "war story." He had been met at the carousel by GlobalCo representatives. Some guys have all the luck!

CPA License No. 007 — International Accountant of Mystery

I like to call myself the "International Accountant of Mystery." CPAs have an undeserved reputation, I believe — actually our jobs can be interesting and varied. I work in a tiny slice of the tax world that is often known as "expatriate services." When a U.S. citizen moves abroad, he or she still is liable to file U.S. tax returns — unlike nationals of almost any other country. I'm the guy your company hires to do your taxes when they get really complicated because you're working in Nigeria or Tajikistan or Papua New Guinea; although, more typically, it's because you're working in the United Kingdom, Canada, Saudi Arabia, or India.

I'm an able, competent tax guy, but perhaps more importantly, I like people. When GlobalCo sends me to Nigeria, what matters most is that, as I sit with each expat, I make him (or her) feel like things are under control. That's not an easy proposition in Nigeria, where people generally have to ship a year's worth of groceries from home, where the Internet barely works, and where it's often not safe to send or receive anything by post. The people sent there to work are more cut off from civilization than most of us could imagine, and it can wear on them. It wears on the spouses who accompany them even more; and it's hard on the kids. If they feel like we will make their tax matters easy for them, that their tax returns are under control, and that we're standing with them, then we've done them a small but important service.

So on these "fly in" visits, we International Accountants of Mystery must be many things. We must be tax experts, and we must be well-traveled. We must know what to do if we're stranded at an airport in Angola. We must be senior enough that we are credible and the expats take us seriously. We must be experienced enough to know how to handle a taxpayer if he or she becomes upset, for whatever reason, and stressed-out taxpayers on international assignment sometimes do get upset. We have to be able to appear impartial while presenting the employer's policies in a positive light, and we have to be ready for whatever "oddball" tax questions might come up. It helps if, in addition to being well-traveled, we have lived abroad, so we can commiserate knowingly when the expats speak of the various hardships they face. So, we're a rare breed, we International Accountants of Mystery. Sure, we all can find something to complain about in regard to our jobs; but, on the other hand, when you've got the travel bug — like I do — it's pretty nice when your job has sent you to 17 foreign countries. Indeed, I write this from an Irish pub in my 18th country, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Impressions of Another Country

I know people who love Nigeria. I don't know how to respond to that. What I've seen is a very narrow view, but I have no access to more. From what I have seen and learned, the country has little modern infrastructure, its government seems largely inattentive to the needs of its citizenry, there's talk of much corruption, and so, the local people, that I have come into contact with, seem frequently cynical, wily, and impatient. The color of my skin marks me. It's perhaps a good lesson to be on the other side of that divide, but I don't like it, and I squirm in my post-civil rights, post-apartheid guilt. I squirm as the Nigerian servants in the GlobalCo guesthouse call me "sir," deferentially, wait on me attentively, absurdly grateful for a $1 tip. I squirm at the inequity, the enormous sea of tin-roofed shacks surrounding the eye-popping palaces of the elite. Lagos is bigger than New York and Los Angeles combined, yet you have no sense of it as you fly in at night, because it's dark, just little cook stove flames dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see — there's no power, no plumbing or sewerage available to most of the population, in a city of unknown size — 20 million, maybe? Even when forewarned, visitors are surprised by the stench of the place.

For the expats, our arrival is a break from the routine, and we're taken out to dinner by a group of them. This year they take us to the latest thing to hit Victoria Island, the central district of Lagos — a Japanese restaurant. Although my personal motto is "I work to travel and I travel to eat," I find myself hesitant to eat raw fish caught in these polluted waters. But I am assured that the fish is all flown in from elsewhere — and how sad, I realize, that in this city of islands, I'm relieved to eat foreign fish. We visit one expat's apartment, outside the compound — huge, an oasis, really. Like so many, these are career expats, moving from one five-year assignment to the next, and at some point they cross a line. Five years in Angola, three in Indonesia, five in Thailand, four in Nigeria ... are you American any more? When you move back to Houston after 20 years abroad, will you feel like you have anything in common with your neighbors at all? Some of them end up retiring in Thailand or Costa Rica. The career expats who offer their hospitality have a beautiful home full of artifacts from their travels, and they're generous with the beer and appetizers. I try to imagine how hard it must be to come by the Japanese rice crackers I munch with my Nigerian Heineken.

The compound is a tiny community, one of the wives tells me it's just like being back in junior high, and I can easily imagine. A few dozen families, a few hundred people, most of them living inside the barbed wire-encircled compound, everyone knowing everyone's business, the unemployed wives struggling to find meaning, to keep their kids in line, to run a household when there are some things you can only shop for once a year, others that involve going to the marketplace to change your dollars into thick wads of local currency. Some wives love it, some hate it, all are affected by it. The kids undoubtedly will be more well-rounded and "worldly" for having had this overseas experience, though I wonder how a 13-year old who has spent five years in Nigeria can be prepared for high school in California.

Some of the expats and their spouses are fresh and excited about what they're doing, some are pretty crispy around the edges. But all of them are characters. Really, there has to be something special about you to accept a three- to five-year assignment in equatorial Africa, a place that is very unlike Omaha, or Colorado Springs, or wherever you're from. And for all the griping, all the impatience with the locals and their ways, and the difficulty of being here, most of them, when you ask them, say they're glad that they've taken the assignment. And, as the expats all freely admit, there are the advantages: experiencing a different culture, developing a particular skill set, attractive compensation. But for me, the service provider, the International Accountant of Mystery who just has to fly in and deal for a week, it is a curious and, from my vantage point, unenviable situation. I marvel at how they do it.

Another Job Done — Departing from Nigeria

The drive from the airport, which took 45 minutes on a quiet Sunday night, takes nearly three hours to re-trace. Lagos has no highways, no trains, as I said earlier, almost no modern infrastructure. I thought I knew about traffic from driving southern California freeways, but the traffic of Lagos is epic. Even the simple van ride to the airport has my stomach churning. The bus lurches along roads that haven't been repaired in what must be decades, no traffic lights, no cops, the side of every road lined with stalls and shops and commerce. They send a 20-seat air-conditioned minibus to take two accountants to the airport, and we compete on the road with countless ramshackle yellow vans, the public transportation system of Lagos, each packed to the gills with people, limbs hanging out the windows and open doors.

The airport is barely controlled chaos, again with pushing and shoving, so many passengers with an unspoken message — could it be "get me out of here!"? The main departure terminal is famous for a massacre that happened some years ago. Now, however, I am assured that the security is better; in fact, the guards pushed several people aside with their automatic weapons to enable us to enter — the foreign businessmen aren't asked for identification, yet the Nigerian locals can't enter the airport terminal in their own country without documents. I do feel secure … but it's deflating. We're leaving Lagos a day early and managed to call back to the United States to change our reservations, but it's a challenge to check in with paper tickets that don't match our reservation. Our GlobalCo representatives see us through the process, and are delighted with the $5 tips my boss gives them.

When we get through passport control, there's a sweeping view of the airport runways, greeted with empty jetway after empty jetway, betraying the sad optimism of the airport's builders — this country is rich, and it could be great, but the politicians seem not to care and/or to be focused on their own needs. It's not that no one wants to do business here — plenty do business in Nigeria — but it will perhaps take a more stable political environment for the country to reach its true potential.

Concluding Thoughts

When my mother recently commented that I was lucky to do so much travel, I replied, "Mom, business travel is only glamorous if you don't do it." When you're talking about airport security lines, bad hotel food, lumpy beds, and lost baggage, that's true. But nobody forces me to do the foreign travel — I do it because I love it. And I love it even when I don't enjoy it. I'm the guy who knows that Nigerian chicken tastes better than American (in Nigeria, all chickens are "free range"). I'm the guy who knows that in the Netherlands, coffee break includes a glass of buttermilk, and that in a Singaporean cafeteria, you do well to choose the local food over the "Western selection." I know how to bow properly in Tokyo, and I know my way around the Moscow subway. And at another level, I have a little more inkling than most Americans about the obstacles that big-city dwellers in Africa face, I've seen the hardship of a Russian winter, and I've felt the uneasy give-and-take of bilingual societies like Belgium and Quebec. With every seemingly mundane experience, I understand the world a little better. We International Accountants of Mystery are a lucky bunch.

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