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Withholding tax drag

The permanent loss of return caused by foreign tax withheld on dividends and interest that cannot be reclaimed or credited by the fund or its investors.

A US-domiciled fund receiving dividends from a European company may suffer 15% to 30% withholding at source. Whether any of it is recoverable depends on the fund's domicile, the treaty between that domicile and the source country, and the investor's own tax position.

The effect is structural, not a fee, and it is one reason two funds tracking the same international index report different results. Irish-domiciled funds, for example, benefit from a treaty rate on US dividends that funds in some other domiciles do not obtain.

For an international equity fund yielding 3%, a 15 percentage point difference in unrecoverable withholding is roughly 0.45% a year, which is larger than most expense ratios. See tracking-difference and ucits.

Related: tracking-difference, ucits, total-return, dividend, fee-drag, index-fund

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