Plans used to minimise taxes for taxpayers.
Both Starbucks and Fiat represent, if one listened closely to the live press release broadcast, an first salvo by the EU Commission to establish that it has the authority, under a State Aid premise, to step into the shoes of the national revenue authority and re-allocate profits of an enterprise according to the EU Commission’s…
On august 7, 2015, OECD released its Update on Voluntary Disclosure Programmes: A pathway to tax compliance, a renewed edition of the survey published in 2010, aimed at providing guidance to governments wishing to offer taxpayers the chance to come forward and become compliant, regularizing their tax affairs and declare income and wealth that have…
Written by Associate Professor, PhD Anders N. Laursen, Department of Law, Aarhus University and Technical Advisor to CORIT Advisory On June 4th 2015 the High Court of Eastern Denmark decided to refer a case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concerning the Danish mandatory group taxation regime. Also in June 2015, the Commission issued…
The case brings about the opportunity to fill a gap in the Norwegian tax law. In order to determine the fiscal residence of a corporation, the current formula stipulated by art. 2(2) Tax Act uses the notion of ‘belonging to the jurisdiction’, while the OECD model employs the term ‘place of effective management’[1] as a…
On August 5, 2015 Grant Thornton (GT) published their annual International Business Report, a global “mid market survey covering more than 10,000 companies in 35 economies”. Unfortunately, their website only provides summaries; the full report relating to tax is not available on the site. It appears a sensible assumption the mid market companies surveyed engage in cross…
In line with BEPS Action 12, the Brazilian President enacted, on July 21, 2015, the Provisional Measure (“MP”) no. 685, creating the obligation for taxpayers to disclose aggressive tax plannings. Even though this MP is enforceable immediately, the actual disclosure still depends on regulations to be issued in the near future. In addition, a MP…
The 2010 Green Paper from the EU Commission led to significant amendments to the EU Auditor regulation (see REGULATION (EU) No 537/2014 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 16 April 2014 on specific requirements regarding statutory audit of public-interest entities and repealing Commission Decision 2005/909/EC). One such amendment is a ban against…
Part 1 of the Report to G20 Development Working group (DWG) on the impact of BEPS in Low Income countries (LICs), dated July 2014, listed in its Section 6: Other High priority BEPS Issues for developing countries, paragraph c), the topic of base erosion through wasteful tax incentives designed to attract investment, labeling it as…
The FFI GIIN List Update (Lists from June 1, 2014 through June 1, 2015) On 1 June 2015 the IRS published its thirteenth FATCA GIIN list of “approved FFIs” (a list of the financial firms that have registered on the IRS FATCA portal). Total approved FFIs reached 165,461, and increase of only 2,851 during the…
Action 6 of the BEPS Action plan is aimed at (i) developing Model Treaty provisions and recommendations on the design of domestic tax rules to prevent the granting of treaty benefit in inappropriate circumstances, (ii) clarifying that tax treaties are not intended to be utilized to generate double non-taxation, and (iii) identifying tax policy considerations…
Along the last 15 years, the discussion of tax planning in Brazil evolved significantly, changing from a very formalist approach to an approach that scares taxpayers by its aggressiveness and lack of limits. Changes that have happened without significant change of law. Brazilian doctrine used to defend that transactions should have been analyzed from legal…
Whoever thinks that a resident company’s income is protected from taxation in countries where it has no PE, is in for a rude awakening; it is not. The allowance for CFC rules in the OECD Model Convention (hereafter “MC”) commentaries is so all encompassing that it covers far more than just the taxation of a…
There are a lot of opinions on multinationals and their tax practices. One conventional perception is that multinationals have a general tax advantage over their domestic competitors as their international operations allow for substantial tax management to minimize the corporate tax burden at group level. A number of tax policy projects are in process and…
Following my latest post on the Court of Justice’s decision in Commission v UK (C-172/13, ECLI:EU:C:2015:50), I want to turn in this comment on the related issue of currency losses, which was recently addressed by Advocate General Kokott in her Opinion in case X AB v Skatteverket (C-686/13, ECLI:EU:C:2015:31). The Advocate General concludes that Member…
