Isha Sekhri: Building A Practice On Integrity In A World That Rewards Clever Arguments

There is a slide Isha Sekhri opens certain client presentations with. It lists some of India’s largest, most recognisable companies, names most people would associate with scale, sophistication, and excellent advisors. They are on the slide not as success stories. They are there because they faced Enforcement Directorate notices, each of them after trying to make the law fit their preferred facts rather than the other way around.

“That pattern is avoidable,” she said, “and I’m not interested in being part of it.”

That sentence tells you more about Isha Sekhri and Associates LLP than most firm profiles ever will. In a profession where billing is often tied to volume and client relationships are sometimes managed more carefully than client outcomes, Isha Sekhri has built her practice around a single, uncomfortably direct principle: if a client’s objective can only be achieved through an aggressive position with no real support, she does not take the mandate. Full stop.

It has made for a smaller practice than a more accommodating philosophy might have built. It has also made for one with a specific and hard-earned reputation in the fields of Transfer Pricing, FEMA, and international taxation, the three disciplines she chose to go narrow and deep on when most CA firms of her era were building broad, multi-service offerings.

A Grade 9 Aptitude Test And A Father’s World

Isha Sekhri did not arrive at the CA profession through any particular calling. She was candid about that when she spoke with CEO VINE.

“I wasn’t attracted to the profession of Chartered Accountancy for its own sake, at least initially,” she said. “My father is a Chartered Accountant, and he had a thriving practice with fairly big names from the glamorous film industry. Looking back, I think what first drew me in was that world, rather than the profession itself.”

The actual decision came from a school aptitude test in Grade 9, which threw up two options: Computer Engineer or Chartered Accountant. She chose the latter, partly because her father’s existing practice offered a platform rather than a blank slate. It was, by her own description, an unglamorous, data-driven decision. The deeper conviction about the profession, and specifically about what she wanted to do within it, came more than a decade later.

Her career began at Ernst and Young in 2009, working on cross-border income tax advisory from the very start. What that environment gave her was not simply technical training. It recalibrated her baseline.

“Excellence wasn’t something explained to me in a training session,” she has said. “It was lived, every day, by the people around me. I absorbed that as a baseline rather than a goal, which is a different thing entirely, and it’s stayed with me permanently.”

She also discovered, inside EY’s work, something about her own professional instincts she could not have known beforehand: she was drawn to the parts of the work with no settled answer yet, provisions still being interpreted, fact patterns nobody had quite seen before.

After EY, she worked within her father’s practice, where the gap she had been quietly identifying became visible close up. The clients in front of her were dealing with genuine complexity, family trusts, cross-border structures, regulatory questions without textbook answers, while the work available through conventional CA services was not built to address it. International taxation and FEMA became her centre of gravity almost by necessity.

“That’s where the most complex issues kept landing, and where I felt I could add the most value,”she says. 

Building Without A Business Plan

The decision to build an independent practice was not a single moment. Isha Sekhri is precise about this.

“There wasn’t a dramatic moment,” she shared. “It happened gradually. I took the time to find what I genuinely enjoyed doing. Once I discovered that cross-border advisory and FEMA were where I could create the most value, the decision became much clearer.”

What gave her confidence was not a plan. It was her clients.

“With every engagement, I found myself becoming more comfortable advising independently, taking ownership of complex matters, and seeing clients return because they trusted my advice. That confidence wasn’t built overnight; it was earned, one assignment and one relationship at a time.”

The first year surprised her. She had prepared for difficulty. What she found instead was intellectual stimulation, early client trust, and a daily practice she looked forward to. What she had not fully prepared for was the difference between doing excellent technical work and leading people who do excellent technical work, a lesson she is still working through.

“Technical expertise had always come naturally to me, but managing people required a completely different set of skills.”

She describes early leadership as swinging between two imperfect extremes, too accommodating, then too direct, before arriving at something harder to hold but more useful: combining accountability with respect, high standards with genuine care. One story she shared illustrated both the challenge and the culture she is trying to build. A team member who had recently become a mother was struggling. Rather than a conversation about productivity, Isha Sekhri asked her whether she was getting enough rest. The team member started crying. She wasn’t.

“I offered to pay for a nanny and asked her to leave an hour earlier every day so she could rest, spend time with her child, or simply have an hour for herself,” she explained. “At that moment, what she needed wasn’t performance management; she needed someone to recognise that she was a person before she was an employee.”

Why She Only Does Three Things, And Does Them Completely

The question of why she chose to specialise so narrowly gets an unusually direct answer. “Because that’s what I define as fun,” she has said. “I’m naturally drawn to work that requires judgment, problem-solving, and first-principles thinking rather than simply following a process.”

In plain language, Transfer Pricing governs what happens when related companies across borders do business with each other. The rule is that they must price intercompany transactions as if they were dealing at arm’s length, the same price an unrelated party would charge. Without this, a multinational group could shift profits to wherever taxes are lowest by pricing internal transactions to suit.

“What goes wrong is almost always the same story,” she explained. “Companies treat their transfer pricing documentation as a paperwork exercise rather than an accurate reflection of where the real economic activity, value, and decision-making actually happen.”

FEMA, she argues, is widely misunderstood, and not because the law is obscure. The common failure is more basic: many businesses simply don’t have FEMA in the room when a decision is being made. A share is issued, a loan is taken, and the law only enters the conversation after there is already a gap to fix. The most important professional advice she has ever received came from senior FEMA practitioner Mr. Rashmin Sanghvi early in her career: “FEMA is an intention, not just a law.” It changed how she reads every regulation since.

The differentiation she draws between compliance and advisory is similarly precise.

“Compliance tells you what the rule requires,” she shares . “Advisory tells you what to do about it, for your specific structure, your specific transaction, your specific risk. A compliance-only mindset stops at the question asked; an advisory mindset asks what else is true about this client’s exposure that they need to know, even if it wasn’t part of the brief.”

The Case She Could Not Stop Thinking About

Mandates she takes on are not processed. They are carried. One in particular has stayed with her: an Indian company whose immediate holding company was in Mauritius, with the ultimate parent in Singapore. The Indian company had issued Compulsorily Convertible Debentures to the Mauritius entity. During assessment, the tax authorities proposed to disregard the Mauritius company altogether, a position that had the potential to affect not just one transaction but the entire tax and regulatory analysis of the investment.

The matter required examining the commercial substance of the structure, the applicable tax treaty, FEMA implications, transfer pricing considerations, and the broader commercial rationale, simultaneously, because every possible argument had consequences elsewhere. 

“I genuinely couldn’t sleep while we were working through it,” she has said. “It wasn’t because of the workload. It was because I felt an enormous sense of responsibility towards the client.” They resolved it successfully. What stayed with her was not the outcome. It was the reinforcement of something she already believed: the most difficult problems are not solved by clever arguments. They are solved by going back to first principles and refusing to stop thinking until the pieces fit together.

The Race She Ran Wrong

Outside the practice, Isha Sekhri runs. Long distances. The discipline shows up in how she talks about resilience and decision-making, and in a story she returned to more than once during the conversation with CEO VINE.

She came last in the hundred-metre parents’ race at her son’s school sports day, by almost thirty seconds. She had run it exactly the way she runs the first hundred metres of a long-distance race: steady, measured, conserving energy for what comes next.

“The only problem was, there was nothing after the hundred metres,” she has shared. “I had forgotten to sprint.”

She thinks about that story often.

“Not every challenge is a marathon, and not every one is a sprint. I see people bring marathon thinking to decisions that need speed and decisive action, and sprint thinking to problems that require patience and endurance. Knowing which race you’re in, and having the self-awareness to override your default, is half the strategy.”

That self-awareness, combined with her father’s foundational lesson that an advisor’s only job is to advise and never to have an agenda, and her own hard-won understanding of what it takes to build a team rather than simply a practice, is the architecture of how Isha Sekhri runs the firm. She wants, eventually, to be unnecessary for individual decisions.

“One of my goals is that clients don’t ask for me specifically because they have complete confidence in the quality of advice they receive from anyone in the firm,” she said. “That means investing in people, transferring judgment rather than just technical knowledge, and building a culture where ownership, integrity, and independent thinking are part of how we work every day.”

The Misconception She Wants Business Leaders To Correct

The most common mistake Indian businesses make when it comes to cross-border compliance is not a technical error. It is a timing one.

“The complexity people experience in FEMA is rarely created by the law itself,” she said. “It’s usually created by seeking advice after the decision has already been made.” A one-hour conversation before signing a term sheet, she says, can save months of restructuring and unnecessary cost.

More pointedly, she wants founders to understand the true arithmetic of non-compliance. A compliance requirement has a defined cost: professional fees and the time needed to get it right. A non-compliance compounds: the original compliance cost, plus interest, penalties, regulatory fees, and remediation. But sitting above all of those is the most underestimated cost: management time, uncertainty, and the stress of carrying an unresolved issue into a due diligence exercise or a fundraise that should otherwise have been straightforward.

“Proactive compliance isn’t a cost centre,” she has said. “It’s a competitive advantage.”

The practice she is building, one she hopes will eventually outlast her own direct involvement, is measured by a specific outcome in her mind: that clients call before they make an important cross-border decision, not after something has gone wrong.

“Compliance is simply the outcome of good advice,” she has said. “What we really do is help businesses make better cross-border decisions.”

That is a quieter pitch than most advisory firms make. It is also a more honest one.

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Isha Sekhri and Associates LLP is based in India, specialising in Transfer Pricing, FEMA, and international taxation advisory for multinationals, family-owned businesses, and startups navigating cross-border growth.