Organisation for Economic and Commercial Development.
The OECD has today published details of the peer review and monitoring process of the Mutual Agreement Procedure (MAP) under Action 14 of the BEPS Action Plan. The framework includes the terms of reference for peer review based on the Action 14 final report minimum standards, an assessment methodology for the process and a reporting…
The Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive (ATAD) is the European answer to the phenomenon of BEPS: Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. Characteristically for tax avoidance by Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, is that it takes place within multinational groups (MNE’s). Therefore, the ATAD applies to these groups of companies. Nevertheless, the European Commission has chosen to also…
On September 14th, 2016, the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service (“RFB”) published the Normative Instruction RFB No. 1,658/2016, which included legal entities incorporated as holding companies in Austria in the list of privileged fiscal regimes. Although the list mentions “legal entities incorporated in the form of holding company“, the wording is imprecise, because the administration of…
Tax practitioner’s in the northern hemisphere taking their summer holidays may well have included the OECD discussion draft of 5 July 2016 on the attribution of profits to permanent establishments as part of their holiday reading (a mere 40 pages). See post on July 21, 2016. Over 50 organisations and individuals submitted comments(published by the…
A considerable increase of transfer pricing disputes could be observed in Italy over the last decade. Notwithstanding the rising trend of proceedings activated by the Tax Authorities and further scrutinized by the Italian Courts, there is not – to date – a jurisprudential orientation such to provide the interpreter with the necessary guidance in the…
On 24 August 2016, the US Treasury Department issued a White Paper on “The European Commission’s Recent State Aid Investigations of Transfer Pricing Rules” (the “White Paper”), denouncing the Commission’s “new approach” as “an unforeseeable departure from the status quo” whose retroactive application “would be inconsistent with EU legal principles” and “undermine the G20’s efforts…
The post-BEPS international tax scenario is in transition to a much more inter-nation equitable system, where the national tax base will be much better protected against erosion and profit-shifting corporate manipulations than it was in pre-BEPS times. The international tax system, however, is not yet stable,[1] and despite OECD’s efforts to uniform national responses within…
A thought-provoking and insightful series of papers on taxpayer rights have just been published in the latest edition of The Tax Lawyer,[1] published by the American Bar Association Section of Taxation. These papers were presented at the inaugural International Conference on Taxpayer rights held in Washington, DC in November 2015, initiated by Nina Olson, National…
the world is full of black and grey hat tax administrations. The U.S. has the opportunity to leverage its power as the world’s safe (tax) haven for bi-lateral information exchange as a carrot – stick policy tool to clean them up, and move them to become white hat, best practices tax administrations.
On May 10, 2016, the Indian Finance Ministry announced that a new protocol has been finalized to amend certain provisions of the Indo-Mauritius double taxation avoidance agreement. According to a press release issued by the Finance Ministry, the protocol is aimed at tackling the dual problem of treaty shopping and round tripping of funds, besides…
Introduction While tax legislation is subject to continuous changes, tax treaties are an interesting tool whereby Contracting States offer investors some degree of legal certainty, especially where there is a recognition that internal law should not override tax treaties’ provisions. Article 2(4) of OECD-MA can be seen as a provision intended to assure the continuity…
The attribution of profits to a permanent establishment is already a complex issue with at least three separate regimes in the tax treaty context- the OECD Authorised Approach under the 2010 OECD version of Article 7 of the OECD Model, the AOA subject to limitations required by the pre-2010 version and that permitted by Article…
Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”) has become one of the top priorities on the Agenda of almost all supranational bodies (OECD, EU, UN) and many jurisdictions. Due to the overall lack of revenues by Countries and the innumerable tax-related leaks (Luxleaks, Panama papers, etc.) along with the recent and ongoing changes within the worldwide international tax…
On June 27, 2016 the EU Commission published the long awaited Starbucks State Aid decision (see here). The EU Commission’s decision challenges the outcome of the Advanced Pricing Agreement (APA) between the Netherlands Tax Authority (Tax Authority) and Starbucks Manufacturing BV (SMBV), a wholly owned and controlled coffee roasting operation. Below is the Part I…
