Base Erosion and Profit Shifting – A project of the OECD to curb international income tax planning.
What do these two things have in common? Dr. Andrew P. Morriss, Dean & Anthony G. Buzbee Dean’s Endowed Chair, Texas A&M School of Law explains In 1998, seven US heavy-duty diesel engine (HDDE) manufacturers agreed to pay USD83m to settle a suit by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) contending that the HDDE manufacturers had used clever…
Model tax treaties do matter. The OECD and UN Models constitute precedent books with standard clauses that contracting states can follow or adapt to suit their particular circumstances. The US Model treaty, in contrast, is a statement of intent. The preamble to the revised 2016 US Model Income Tax Convention released by the US Treasury…
(“Every in-house tax department should have their own IT/Financial systems capacity” – JHM, TP Minds London, 2015.) The unexpected benefit from country by reporting (“CbyC”) reporting is that tax departments may learn something about their own groups’ financial systems. What is there to learn? If you are in-house, answer these four questions: 1. Do you…
MNC profit shifting has received major attention over the past few years. Total earnings stockpiled overseas are now reported to be in excess of $2 trillion. One of the authors published a technical tax article in Tax Notes on July 13, 2015, demonstrating that foreign subsidiaries of many MNCs are highly vulnerable to IRS attack using an…
(about the switch-over clause in the ATA Directive) In order to combat BEPS, the European Commission is proposing to start taxing low taxed non-EU income. That sounds reasonable, but the consequence will be that in the EU, there will be no more profits to tax. This is a proposal that is not necessary to prevent…
On 28 January 2016, the European Commission issued its proposal for a Council Directive dealing with tax avoidance practices within the EU – the so-called Anti-BEPS Directive. The context of the proposal is well known: in a nutshell, the proposal results from the dual influences of the (thus far) failed 2011 CCCTB proposal and the…
I. Introduction Shall international tax planning decrease after the implementation of BEPS? The reply is “depends” by virtue of the subject’s exposure to several variables. Obviously, one should consider the question in the light of the legislative framework and tax environment of the relevant country which is in principle the country for which tax planning…
On January 15, 2016, in a joint (bi-partisan) letter of Senate Finance Committee Republicans and Democrats to US Treasury, one that will certainly be of interest to our friends at Wolters Kluwer (a Netherlands parent multinational enterprise), the Senate Finance Committee members encouraged Treasury to use a tit-for-tat strategy against the EU Commission. The letter stated that…
Interest and penalty regimes place a high premium on correctly identifying the existence of a permanent establishment in the territory of a state. The failure to do so often means that there is no reporting to the tax administration by the foreign enterprise by way of registration or filing of returns. This is particularly true…
In his last State of the Union speech on January 13, 2016 Obama put it quite clear: “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close.” With this statement Obama obviously addressed the position of the United States in terms of military capacity and its position in…
The Spanish National Court has recently ruled (case no. 182/2012) that a Spanish affiliate of Dell that sold Dell computers in Spain under a commissionaire agreement with Dell Ireland constituted a permanent establishment of the Irish group sales company. The decision is in line with earlier Spanish Supreme Court Decisions in Roche Vitamins Europe SA…
Starbucks Manufacturing BV (SMBV), based in the Netherlands, is the only coffee roasting company in the Starbucks group in Europe. It sells and distributes roasted coffee and coffee-related products (e.g. cups, packaged food, pastries) to Starbucks outlets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Read my previous comments on this case post here. The EU…
The raison d’être of corporate taxation relates to the aim of achieving an impartial treatment of different legal forms in order to safeguard a level playing field for conducting business. In the EU this aim must be contemplated in conjunction with the objective of establishing an internal market free of fiscal barriers. The present post…
Written by Associate Professor, PhD, Michael Tell, Department of Law, Copenhagen Business School and Technical Advisor, CORIT Advisory. Darwin’s theory of evolution states that complex creatures evolve from more simplistic ancestors, while natural selection ensures that only the fittest survive and the others become evolutionary “dead-ends”. The aim of this blog contribution is to address…
