Base Erosion and Profit Shifting – A project of the OECD to curb international income tax planning.
Dr. Andrew Morriss, Dean of Texas A&M University School of Law The rapidly shifting world of international financial and tax regulation – from the OECD’s BEPS to FATCA – is reshaping the world. Many of these policies are being adopted without regard to whether they produce net benefits (e.g. revenue in excess of the costs…
Article 7(1) of the OECD model treaty is perhaps the most important rule regulating the international taxation of business. It sets out the fundamental basis on which businesses are taxed, that is, the state of residence has the primary right to tax with source state entitlement restricted to taxing the profits of permanent establishments. Source…
BEPS-Project? CFC rules and transfer pricing? Treaty abuse and dispute resolution? Why bother for such complicated things? Greece has a “perfect” solution against base erosion and profit shifting through cross-border schemes: It is for this purpose that Greece has imposed since March 21st, 2015, an additional condition for the recognition of any expenses payable to…
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…
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…
This contribution is aimed at surveying the interaction and reciprocal influence between the OECD-G20 BEPS Action Plan (the BEPS Plan), on one hand, and contemporary tax developments occurred in the Latin American (LATAM) region, particularly those geared to counteract base eroding and profit shifting moves by multinational enterprises (MNEs), on the other. At first glance,…
The claim for the so-called “single taxation principle”, in spite of its doubtful general acceptance, seems to have been acknowledged by the OECD, which has moved from a position whereby countries should explicitly state the limits of the application of tax treaties in case of abuse, to an opposite view ascertaining that tax treaty protection…
After the first post on BEPS, I decided to go laterally and approach an issue that may resonate to many tax practitioners but unfortunately is not so widely discussed perhaps because of its interdisciplinary impacts – what are the consequences and limits for this “rush” towards massification of tax information data retrieval and exchange. We…
It is well known that case law from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) imposes limitations on the application of anti-avoidance rules by Member States. Accordingly, it is of vital importance that recommendations made under the OECD project on base erosion on profit shifting (the BEPS project), are adaptable, where necessary, to enable Member States…
In July 2013, the OECD published its Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, aimed at ensuring the coherence of corporate income taxation at the international level. Action 3 of the Plan stressed the need to address base erosion and profit shifting through CFC rules, since then existing domestic CFC rules do not always…
I ”grew up” believing that publications of the OECD are the bibles of taxation. They are scientific master pieces, tell you what to do and, like other holy books, are often open for multiple interpretations. My multiple contacts with the OECD over several years strongly nuanced that view. First, there were the invitations to congresses:…
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”, Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Mayor (and former Obama White House chief-of-staff) Fundamental reforms are always controversial and the G20/OECD hard-pressed Base Erosion Profit Shifting project is no exception to this rule. They shake with presumed principles, they provoke a wide debate, they alarm businesses if they…
Two years ago, the OECD’s BEPS project started with the goal that Multinational Enterprises pay their fair share of taxes. There was some hope that unfair tax competition, especially in the form of US Multinationals not being subject to tax on their foreign income, could be stopped. Realizing, that a change of US tax rules,…
