Where lease populations usually hide gaps

Finance teams in Taiwan often keep a tidy register of office leases and factory land agreements. The gaps appear in places nobody labeled as a lease: multi-year logistics contracts with exclusive dock access, equipment maintenance bundles that include dedicated machinery, and warehouse side letters that quietly extend exclusive use.

When we open a lease portfolio audit, we start with vendor spend above a materiality threshold and ask which arrangements convey the right to control an identified asset. That question surfaces more additions than a pure contract-title search.

A practical check before year-end: pull the top twenty non-lease vendors by annual spend, read the service descriptions for exclusive assets, and flag anything lasting longer than twelve months. Those candidates belong in the population conversation with your auditor—whether or not they ultimately meet the IFRS 16 definition.

Document the judgment either way. A short memo that explains why a logistics contract was excluded is far easier to defend in March than reconstructing the decision after the disclosure draft is already circulating.