A newly incorporated Turkish subsidiary wants to bring in two expatriate managers from head office. The incorporation is complete, the office is leased, and the offers are ready to go out. Then the work permit application is refused.
The reason is usually the employment ratio. Türkiye generally expects an employer to maintain a number of Turkish employees for each foreign national it sponsors. A company with no Turkish staff on its SGK registration has nothing to count against.
Why it surprises people
Nothing in the incorporation process flags it. You can form a company, register for tax, open a bank account and lease premises without anyone mentioning employment ratios. The requirement only surfaces at the permit application, by which point the hiring decision has usually been made and communicated.
What to do instead
Sequence the local hiring first. Register the Turkish employees with SGK, let the registration establish itself, then file the expatriate applications against a payroll that already exists.
Where the business genuinely cannot operate before the expatriate arrives, there are structures worth considering — a liaison office has a different position on expatriate staff, and certain investment categories are treated differently.
The point is that this is a sequencing problem, and sequencing problems are cheap to solve in advance and expensive to solve afterwards.
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- #employment
- #market entry