Coca-Cola announced that it would appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Atlanta, the Tax Court’s final entered decision of August 2, 2024, in favor of the IRS’ determination of $9 billion of transfer pricing adjustments and the validity of the IRS’ blocked income regulations.[1] The 240-page Coca-Cola 2020 Tax Court decision[2]…
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its expected overruling of the Chevron doctrine, which has been relied upon in 70 past Supreme Court decisions and approximately 17,000 in the Appellate and District courts.[1] I was reminded of a discussion about Chevron’s deference at the ABA Tax Section Transfer Pricing committee meeting at the mid-year…
At the end of 2017, Congress passed a once-off Mandatory Repatriation Tax (the “MRT”) of 8 to 15.5 percent of the undistributed total accumulated income of American-controlled foreign corporations over the past thirty years (since 1987).[1] This accumulated income, if distributed, would be taxed in the hands of the American shareholders. However, because Congress cannot…
The Tax Court issued a nine to eight split decision of six opinions (three in favor and three dissenting) upholding the Service’s 1994 blocked income regulations. Yesterday, February 9, 2023, the Tax Court finally issued its ‘split’ decision regarding the 3M “blocked income” issue (formally, a decision regarding the validity of the Treasury Regulation regarding…
“It follows that only the national law applicable in the Member State concerned must be taken into account in order to identify the reference system for direct taxation, that identification being itself an essential prerequisite for assessing not only the existence of an advantage; but also whether it is selective in nature.”[1] With this statement,…
On August 25, 2022, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals answered a fundamental question about advance pricing agreements (APAs): Is an APA a contract between the IRS and a taxpayer?[1] If it is a contract, is it subject to contract law? Circuit Judge John Nalbandian answered this question for the unanimous three-judge Appellate panel, opening…
On Thursday, August 18, 2022, Chief Judge Kathleen Kerrigan of the U.S. Tax Court published her 75-page decision on the Medtronic and I.R.S. controversy (“Medtronic III”).[1] This decision resulted from a remand by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (“Medtronic II”) of her original 144-page 2016 decision (“Medtronic I”).[2] The IRS and Medtronic had agreed…
The U.S. has a highly successful international financial service industry that is important to the U.S. economy, exemplified by, firstly, the international financial centers such as Miami and New York of over a half-trillion dollars of foreign deposits of high net wealth individuals whom many experts allege are not tax and exchange control compliant in…
We commend the OECD’s 15-year effort since its 2005 publication of E-commerce: Transfer Pricing and Business Profits Taxation to address the challenges arising from the digitalization of multinational enterprises’ business models and the evolution of cross-border ecommerce. Our comments and recommendations are submitted in an academic capacity and do not represent an official statement or…
Since 2013 the OECD has worked on forging a grand coalition (now 136 countries) it calls the “Inclusive Framework” around adopting the outcomes of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project of 15 reports. In 2005, ten years before the BEPS reports, the OECD published E-commerce: Transfer Pricing and Business Profits Taxation to…
Our 14-page comments and recommendations of 14 tax professionals and academics from 11 countries raise additional issues and concerns, and propose additional recommendations to undertake a detailed cost benefit analysis of the existing BEPS Actions prior to taking such drastic measures. Our 14 pages of comments and an appendix are available here on SSRN. We…
We applaud the OECD’s 15–year effort since its 2005 publication of E-commerce: Transfer Pricing and Business Profits Taxation to address the challenges arising from the digitalization of multinational enterprises’ business models and the evolution of cross-border ecommerce. We support the 6 November 2019 comments of Dr. Lorraine Eden, our colleague, and Dr. Oliver Treidler, that…
In my International Taxation class tomorrow (October 10th) we are going to discuss the OECD’s “Unified Approach” released a day earlier on October 9, 2019. Given the keen interest generated by digital taxation and the allocation of profits/losses generated therefrom, I thought it of interest to the Kluwer International Tax readers that I share my…
William Byrnes, Texas A&M University School of Law* (33-page draft research available on SSRN) Howdy! Earlier today the General Court of the European Court of Justice (EGC) sided with Starbucks’ transfer pricing analysis of its Dutch coffee roaster, and thus against the European Commission’s approach. Thus, I feel that my transfer pricing research about this…
