Organisation for Economic and Commercial Development.
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…
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…
When internationally mobile workers retire, they look to Art 18 of the OECD Model tax treaty to determine their tax treatment if they are private sector workers. Government workers look to Art 19. What about employees of international organisations? Although international civil servants, they work for no government and are outside Art 19. Commonly, treaties…
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,…
The OECD-G20 BEPS Project’s goal is ciclopeous: Making the global tax environment fairer than ever by closing loopholes and adopting rules of international law which would be domesticated simultaneously and uniformly by all participating Nations; and all of that with the aim of making the global enterprise accountable for taxes at source (markets) and home,…
On 11 February 2015 a US District Court found that the US Internal Revenue Service disclosed false tax return information to the Japanese National Tax Administration contrary to the Japan-US tax treaty in Aloe Vera of America Incorporated, et al. v. United States of America (Case No. CV-99-01794-PHX-JAT). The IRS had supplied information showing a…
If time allows, I try to contribute to the OECD discussions submitting comments to their draft papers. Last November and December 2014, the OECD came out with several drafts for discussion (this earlier article tries to summarize them briefly). After reading more than 600 pages of documents during the week of Christmas holiday, I decided…
The OECD Joint Working Group on Business Restructurings is, in many respects, the precursor to the OECD BEPS project. Unresolved Business Restructuring issues, particularly in relation to permanent establishments, have appeared on the BEPS agenda. One question asked by the Joint Working Group was: Can an agency PE exist if the arrangements entered into did…
