In highly dramatic fashion the French tax authorities and IT specialists raided Google’s headquarters and McDonalds. I don’t own Google stock. I’m not in favor of Google’s near monopoly on search (though it has accomplished this by offering a really great product and (free) work tools that make my life much easier). I don’t eat…
“Starbucks tax deal equals inadmissible state aid”: it was with this headline that newspapers reported on 21 October 2015 that the European Commission – instigated by Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition – had ruled that the Netherlands had been favouring Starbucks with an “inadmissible” tax advantage in the 20 to 30 million euro…
BEPS’ input to a fascinating discussion Taxation is the unrivaled field of law where public interest (attending state goals towards the population’s needs as a whole), in one hand, and private wealth protection, in the other, most apparently collide;[1] and the reason for that is quite simple: Public needs are financed out of private wealth…
Volume 44, Issue 4 contains: ARTICLES: Lisette van der HEL – van DIJK, Menno GRIFFIOEN, ‘Tackling VAT-Fraud in Europe: A Complicated International Puzzle’ Abstract: In Europe, the fight against VAT fraud has attracted a lot of attention since the introduction of the current VAT system. The reason for this is simple: VAT fraud leads to…
On April 12, 2016, India’s High Court at Madras delivered a landmark ruling in favor of an anti-avoidance provision (section 94A) introduced in the Indian Income Act, in 2011, to enable the Government to notify for tax purposes foreign tax jurisdictions that do not share tax and other financial information with the tax authority. From…
This month I will discuss the important topic for the anti-money laundering compliance officer, wherein the AML systems overlap with the requirement for tax compliance, and that tax compliance requirement requires tax self certification from each customer of a financial institution. I will provide insight about five topics: The Panama Papers FATCA and its related…
Volume 25 (2016) issue 2 contains: EDITORIAL: MICHAL AUJEAN, ‘Some Twenty-Seven Years after…’ Abstract: When I started writing this editorial a question quickly came to my mind: what have I been doing all these years that I devoted to taxation and more specifically to European tax policy? Then I thought it was time to say…
Massive leaks of information on offshore activity like the Panama Papers illustrate the need for an enhanced global tax cooperation with an improved and deeper interjurisdictional information sharing scheme. In fact, efforts towards reaching a global tax cooperation on obtaining and sharing interjurisdictional information is a longstanding endeavor of the international community, whose origins may…
George Orwell’s parable, Animal Farm, offers insights on political and governmental institutions that bear revisiting from time to time. BEPS Action 6 with the broad title “Prevent treaty abuse” has among its objectives “developing model treaty provisions to prevent the granting of treaty benefits in inappropriate circumstances” and “to clarify that tax treaties are not…
This is the first part of a series about numbers in transfer pricing. In this edition, I look at sticking the TP five methods on a typical profit and loss account (hereafter “P&L”). I find it curious that we do not see a lot more of this around, as I believe it is essential to…
The dust has not settled yet and there is probably much more to come from this and future leaks. Investigations have started, international cooperation will be key and hopefully those that have not respected the law will be punished. Here below a couple of reflections based on what I read/seen/heard these days between one toy…
Treasury recently released its 2015 Transfer Pricing Advance Pricing Agreements Report to Congress, the seventeenth report since the initial 1999 report. Each year, the Treasury APA Report describes the annual experience, structure, and activities of the APMA Program. Treasury also formally released the much discussed new audit/examination protocols that will become effective 1 May 2016. …
A critical appraisal of the EU Switch Over Rule and the Indian Equalization Levy At present, it is unavoidable to recognize that the international tax scenario is in transition to a much more inter-nation equitable system, where the national tax base will be better protected against erosion and profit-shifting corporate manipulations than it was in…
The OECD BEPS project was kicked off by the observation that the interaction of domestic tax systems sometimes leads to an overlap, resulting in double taxation as well as gaps, which result in an item of income not being taxed anywhere, thus resulting in so called “double non-taxation”. Co-operation among countries historically addressed double taxation…
