On august 7, 2015, OECD released its Update on Voluntary Disclosure Programmes: A pathway to tax compliance, a renewed edition of the survey published in 2010, aimed at providing guidance to governments wishing to offer taxpayers the chance to come forward and become compliant, regularizing their tax affairs and declare income and wealth that have…

The case brings about the opportunity to fill a gap in the Norwegian tax law. In order to determine the fiscal residence of a corporation, the current formula stipulated by art. 2(2) Tax Act uses the notion of ‘belonging to the jurisdiction’, while the OECD model employs the term ‘place of effective management’[1] as a…

The first part of this blog post addressed the incompatibility of the anti-hybrid rule proposed by the OECD to the source state (“primary response”), which restricts the right to deduct the payments made to non-residents, with the non-discrimination provision found in article 24(4) of tax treaties patterned on the OECD MC. In this second part…

On August 5, 2015 Grant Thornton (GT) published their annual International Business Report, a global “mid market survey covering more than 10,000 companies in 35 economies”. Unfortunately, their website only provides summaries;  the full report relating to tax is not available on the site. It appears a sensible assumption the mid market companies surveyed engage in cross…

With the declared aim of curbing cross-border tax arbitrage practiced with hybrid financial instruments, the OECD recommended, in Action 2 of the BEPS project, the adoption of anti-hybrid rules, designed to establish a link between the tax treatments applicable to the remuneration derived from financial instruments with characteristics of both equity and debt in the…

The services permanent establishment concept is perhaps the most noteworthy contribution to tax treaties provided by the UN model. The tax treaty concluded by South Africa and the United States in 1997, to replace the one terminated during the apartheid era, has provided an opportunity to consider thorny questions of services and permanent establishments. The…

In line with BEPS Action 12, the Brazilian President enacted, on July 21, 2015, the Provisional Measure (“MP”) no. 685, creating the obligation for taxpayers to disclose aggressive tax plannings. Even though this MP is enforceable immediately, the actual disclosure still depends on regulations to be issued in the near future. In addition, a MP…

In our previous blog we were discussing issues of non-discrimination on the basis of Nationality (article 24.1 MOCDE). Today, it is relevant to point out the fact that the idea of non-discrimination is radically different when the problem is addressed from the perspective of other International Investment Agreements (IIA’s) such as BIT’s and FTA’S. Foreign…

Dr. Andrew P. Morriss is Dean & Anthony G. Buzbee Dean’s Endowed Chairholder, Texas A&M University School of Law; Drew Estes is a JD/MBA Candidate, Class of 2016, University of Alabama. Excerpted from Kluwer CCH’s Global Tax Weekly Magazine Introduction Tax competition is usually portrayed as a competition over rates. Critics argue that such competition leads inevitably…

Part 1 of the Report to G20 Development Working group (DWG) on the impact of BEPS in Low Income countries (LICs), dated July 2014, listed in its Section 6: Other High priority BEPS Issues for developing countries, paragraph c), the topic of base erosion through wasteful tax incentives designed to attract investment, labeling it as…

This week, the United Kingdom Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, has ruled that a UK resident individual member of a Delaware limited liability company is entitled to credit in the UK for US tax on the profits of the LLC. Anson v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2015] UKSC 44 has rejected…