Organisation for Economic and Commercial Development.
In October 2020, the OECD Secretariat published the ‘Report on Pillar One Blueprint‘ approved by the Inclusive Framework on BEPS as a result of the work on the tax challenges arising from digitisation. The Unified Approach (UA), which is the basis of the Blueprint, is intended to complement the existing system of corporate income taxation….
1. Introduction The Pillar Two Report[1] (the “Report”) which contains the Global Minimal Tax (the “GloBE tax”) proposal has recently been on the top of discussions both in the academic and practice world. While the proposals objective is debatable[2], the blueprint contains dozens of new rules, exceptions and mechanisms which may possibly complicate life not…
Since the OECD introduced its Global Anti-Base Erosion Proposal (GLoBE) in early 2019 as the second pillar of the ongoing search for a solution to the tax challenges of the Digitalisation of the economy, the goal of GloBE seems to be moving. On the one hand, already the name suggests that the proposal for a…
1. Introduction The ability to stimulate economic activity and to attract foreign capital and investments through national tax policies has been known for many centuries. It was in the middle of the eighteenth century that the Russian Empress – Catherine the Great – granted to “[…] Foreigners that have settled themselves in Russia to erect…
Those with a long memory for cricketing events may remember the 1996 World Cup hosted jointly by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The winner, Sri Lanka, made 398 runs for 5 wickets, in a one-day international match, a record that stood until April 2006. South Africa’s Gary Kirsten scored 188 runs, not out, against the…
Tatiana Falcão[1] On 22 July 2020 the European Commission opened a public consultation on the Carbon Border Adjustment proposal put forward as part of the EU Green Deal. This is not the first document issued under that initiative. In March 2020 the European Commission published an Inception Impact Assessment Report to discuss policy options for…
This article is the last of a series of three posts dealing with non-chargeable intra group services: Shareholder Activities, Duplicate Activities and Incidental Benefits. This post will specifically focus on the delineation of incidental benefits. To get the bigger picture, transfer pricing rules and the standard on which it relies, the arm’s length principle, considers…
In Part 1, we discussed in a first step the ground barrier for taxing data in the context of international taxation: a proper definition of data. In a second step, we showed you which negative effects result from the trilemma of data-based taxation approaches. In part 2, we want to present possible solutions on how…
For international tax law, it is of central importance how to locate, value & control the increasingly digital cross-border supply and service relationships within a multinational enterprise (MNE). This counts primarily from a tax authority perspective. Nevertheless, digitalization has not only significant effects for highly digitalized businesses but for the economy itself, as the overall…
A couple of days ago, in the last weekly session of the Indiana-Leeds Summer Tax Workshop, I attended the presentation of a fascinating paper by Steven A. Dean (A Constitutional Moment in Cross-Border Taxation)(1) where the author analyzes the political and economic predominant influence of central economies in the design and shape of post-WWI in…
Following the Supreme Court decision in Fowler v HMRC [2020] UKSC 22, the UK First-tier Tribunal has considered another case where classification of a source of income for tax treaty purposes was in issue. This time the question was classification as business profit or income from immovable property in the Canada-UK double tax treaty. In…
The global COVID-19 pandemic that arose in early 2020 could be considered the most disruptive factor the world has witnessed in generations. Paradigms taken for granted until then were upended, resulting in a ‘new normal’ that has changed the way we do business. As with all facets of business, international taxation also came under increased…
Duplicate activities? Duplicate services are defined in the 2017 Transfer Pricing Guidelines (TPG) of the OECD as “activities undertaken by one group member that merely duplicate a service that another group member is performing for itself, or that is being performed for such other group member by a third party.” [1] Those activities are expressively…
Denmark accepted all MLI articles dealing with PEs, but what does that actually mean? Reading the MLI itself leaves one somewhat bewildered, being thrown back and forth between a variety of articles and options. Reading the instrument of ratification, does not necessarily help: it tends be a collection of long list of countries with treaty…
