You need to verify your legal documents before setting up in Saudi Arabia and this can be by opening a branch or relocating employees. The apostille is the easiest legalisation method for global executives and business owners to get their foreign documents recognised in-country. The age of foreign document verification was expedited in Saudi Arabia when the country became a member of the Hague Apostille Convention. When you know how this set-up operates it keeps these operations up and running as opposed to your operation stopping without warning.
This uniform process is utilized by MOFA and local trade portals to screen foreign corporate records. If the verification seals on your papers are not correct, government systems will deny your corporate applications. In this simple guide, you will understand how to legalise your documents in an easy way.
In the earlier days, it was a long process for using overseas documents in Saudi Arabia and it was called embassy attestation. The older process involved a series of stamps by local notaries, state offices in the home country, federal departments, and finally the Saudi embassy.
It made it all easy as pie for the pathway to join the Hague Convention. Now, if your papers hail from a member nation, all you need is a single official certificate affixed to your original document. It is attached to a single document as an apostille certificate.
This apostille certificate does not require you to visit the foreign embassies or other additional diplomatic actions. This saves your expansion team weeks of downtime. This straightforward road only applies without incident if the country issuing the paper and Saudi Arabia are signatories to its convention.
You need to validate the history of your business and the academic records of your workforce. These files are scrutinized by the Saudi authorities to detect any fraud in the companies as well as verify employee qualifications.
There are 2 main groups of papers for which you need to get an apostille:
These apostille documents are mandatory to submit when you register in core systems like Qiwa, MISA and the Ministry of Commerce (MoC).
To get your paperwork ready, you need an orderly sequence of stamps in the country where your document was issued. If you miss a step, the ultimate government portal will reject your files.
This process always begins in your home country. A registered notary public examines your original company documents or degree certificates to verify that they are authentic replicas.
Having sealed the paper, you send it to the local governing office: state home department or secretary of state. This office checks whether the notary status is still active.
You submit that to the relevant federal authority—once you get it signed off by that regional office over there, of course—for its official apostille stamp. In other words, if this is where the Secretary of State sits in the US or the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in India.
Once your apostille documents with their stamped apostille are delivered to Saudi Arabia, they have to be translated into the Arabic language by a certified local interpreter. After that, your government relations officer will then upload these files to the online MOFA portal for registration.
Degree checks are even more rigorous when bringing overseas professionals to Saudi Arabia on an employment contract. To safeguard domestic construction and engineering standards, the government audits technical qualifications.
Your HR team needs to follow the following steps:
Register your local business entity once the documents of the parent company have been verified. Your commercial registration enables your company to sign contracts, open bank accounts and sponsor employees.
Here is a simple roadmap thread to complete setting up your business:
Source: All tax rates, government fees and portal rules are from official guidelines by the Ministry of Investment (MISA), the Ministry of Commerce (MoC) and Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH).
The process is not completed only by obtaining your digital commercial registration certificate. You have 30 days to connect your newly issued professional number with the national online tracking portals.
The first step to get corporate tax and VAT filings is to create a profile within the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) portal. Then login to Qiwa and Muqeem portals to handle worker visa and residency cards. Lastly, create a GOSI account to cover employee work insurance.
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