Base Erosion and Profit Shifting – A project of the OECD to curb international income tax planning.
After the silent collapse of Pillar One earlier this summer, as it now seems, the question as to what’s next seems to be moving up business agendas and political agendas. On an informal meeting of tax practitioners from business and consultancy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on 24 September 2024, the author of the current blog…
Introduction Throughout my professional life, I have worked with international tax law. Consequently, I have witnessed various trends and tendencies for more than a quarter of a century. The period during which I’ve been involved in tax law in my view represents a golden age for the discipline. Significant developments have occurred. During my student…
Back in 2015, my first ever blog asked Does the UK Diverted Profits Tax help or hurt BEPS? Whatever the answer, the level of complexity and the challenges it brought to UK cross-border taxation cannot be underestimated. The recent decision of the UK Upper Tribunal in in Refinitiv Ltd and others v HM Revenue &…
We are happy to inform you that the latest issue of the journal is now available and includes the following contributions: Leonie Fischer, Jessica M. Müller & Christoph Spengel, The Distorting Effects of Imputation Systems on Tax Competition in the EU The design of corporate income tax systems and thus the taxation of (cross-border)…
Even before introduction of the BEPS PPT, the UK has had purpose-based provisions in various forms, designed to limit access to treaty benefits in its double tax treaties since the 1960’s. Its standard formulation first appeared in 1992. Surprisingly, the first case in which the meaning and application of this wording in a tax treaty…
1. Background In the article Is the Multilateral Instrument (MLI) Really Multilateral? published in the book A Multilateral Convention for Tax – From Theory to Implementation of the Wolters Kluwer Series on International Taxation, edited by Sergio André Roche and Allison Christians,[1] I analyze the nature of the MLI, a topic that has raised discussions…
On April 5, 2021, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet YELLEN “grabbed the attention of the occupants of corner offices worldwide with a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The headline was a call for countries to agree on a global minimum tax rate for large companies.” (The Economist, April 8, 2021). In the slipstream,…
Summary There might be a leak in the OECD’s global minimum tax proposals (GLOBE; Pillar Two). To address the remaining challenges of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) by large multinational enterprises the OECD envisages a global minimum level of company taxation and top-up taxation by countries up to that level where other countries do…
As the Blueprint on Pillar I illustrates, the political and technical complexities inherent to the solution sought by OECD are of such magnitude, that such a sole fact opens the window to an alternate, workable outcome to market states; and in this sense, a coordinated treaty response from market states patterned after a source-based withholding…
The digitization and globalization of the economy have created a challenging environment to enforce tax rules and ensure tax compliance. Ever since the OECD’s release of the Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS)[1], the taxation of the digital economy has been under scrutiny from both a direct and indirect tax perspective. The…
Open to public On 27 and 28 January 2021, the 11th meeting of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS was held. For the first time, a meeting of the Inclusive Framework was open to the public. Even though no negotiations took place during the public part of the meeting, access to this provided insight into…
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…
Purpose of the blog This blog raises the question as to whether the Pillar I Amount A proposal is consistent with the value creation standard? Naturally, as a start, the question arises as to what the value creation standard is. Value creation standard Although the meaning of value creation, as used in the BEPS project,…
