Double Taxation, EU law, EU/EEA, International Tax Law, Ireland, MNE Profits, OECD, Permanent Establishments, Tax Treaties, Transfer Pricing, United States

(Temple Tax Chambers; King’s College London)/ /Leave a comment

Two cases, currently before different courts highlight long-standing questions around the attribution of profits to permanent establishments. Irish and United Kingdom law on the attribution of profits to branches of non-resident companies remined identical for decades until 2003. In each country, a non-resident company trading through a branch in that country was chargeable to corporation…

Brazil, OECD, Transfer Pricing

(Rio de Janeiro State University, Sergio André Rocha Advocacia & Consultoria Tributária)/ /Leave a comment

In 2017, Brazil sent a formal request to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”) to become one of its members. It seems that this decision — made by the economic team of former president Michel Temer — was not preceded by relevant discussions with areas potentially impacted by the occasional accession of the…

BEPS

(Texas A&M University Law)/ /Leave a comment

Our 14-page comments and recommendations of 14 tax professionals and academics from 11 countries raise additional issues and concerns, and propose additional recommendations to undertake a detailed cost benefit analysis of the existing BEPS Actions prior to taking such drastic measures.  Our 14 pages of comments and an appendix are available here on SSRN. We…

Double non-taxation, EU law, EU/EEA, Hybrids, OECD

(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)/ /Leave a comment

May linking rules related to hybrid financial instruments be incompatible with the EU Fundamental freedoms? And with Article 24 (4) OECD MC? What about treaty override? It is no secret that hybrid financial instruments (HFIs) serve actual business and legal purposes by allowing investors and issuers to better meet their economic and legal needs from…

EU/EEA, Fixed establishment, OECD, Subsidiary, VAT

(Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law (ACTL) of the University of Amsterdam; Lund University)/ /Leave a comment

On 14 November 2019, AG Kokott released her opinion in Dong Yang Electronics (Case C-547/18), referred to the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) by the Regional Administrative Court of Wroclaw (Poland) and concerning the existence of a VAT fixed establishment (FE) of a third-country (Korea) company in an EU Member State (Poland). As AG…

EU law, EU/EEA, Exchange of Information, Mandatory disclosure

(Pelinck Nijssen Weijers)/ /Leave a comment

In June 2017, the European Commission published its proposal on transparency rules for tax planning by intermediaries and certain taxpayers (the Commission proposal). The Commission proposal was amended multiple times, before it was formally adopted as Directive 2018/822 (DAC6) on 25 May 2018. DAC6 requires Member States to put in place, by 31 December 2019,…

BEPS, Digital services tax, Digitalization, Transfer Pricing

(Texas A&M University Law)/ /1 Comment

We applaud 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. We support the 6 November 2019 comments of Dr. Lorraine Eden, our colleague, and Dr. Oliver Treidler, that…

Dividends, Double Taxation, International Tax Law, Latin America, Netherlands, OECD, Personal income tax, Residence, Tax Treaties, United Nations, Withholding Taxes

(Temple Tax Chambers; King’s College London)/ /1 Comment

Equality is one of the core values of modern democratic societies. It is no accident that equality featured in opening preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the first article of both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

Digital services tax, Turkey

(EY)/ /Leave a comment

The digital economy is faced with major challenges for the international tax system since the traditional tax rules seem to be insufficiently well designed to govern new ways of conducting businesses and unsuitable for accurately detecting and allocating the value created from digitalised business models.[1] This situation has triggered a political and academic discussion about…

EU/EEA, OECD, Sharing economy, Tax Policy, VAT

(Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law (ACTL) of the University of Amsterdam; Lund University)/ /Leave a comment

The past few years have seen the sensational rise of new models of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, which have been synthetically captured under the umbrella definition of “sharing economy”. The ascent of digital platforms – including renowned companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley like Airbnb and Uber, or the French unicorns…

Incentives, Personal income tax, Tax Policy

(University of Belgrade, Faculty of Law)/ /1 Comment

The speed at which the world around us is changing combined with the novelty of the challenges our societies are faced with, seems to lead our policy makers towards what can be described as panic driven decisions. At this point in time we can with some ease point towards the on-going developments regarding variants of…

Fees for technical services, Royalties, Rwanda, Tax Treaties

(ENSafrica)/ /Leave a comment

The Rwandan Income Tax Act (Law nº 016/2018 of 13/04/2018) gazetted on April 16, 2018 overhauled the Rwandan income tax system with various significant changes. One of the changes introduced by the Rwandan Income Tax Act that gave rise to wide discussion among tax practitioners relates to non-deductible expenses—particularly the restriction imposed on the deductibility…

International Tax Law, OECD, Tax Treaties, United Nations

(Temple Tax Chambers; King’s College London)/ /1 Comment

Some four years ago in this blog, I wrote about problems that would start to emerge as exchange of information between tax administrations became more routine and extensive.  If nothing else, the number of disputes in this area was bound to increase. See also Exchange of Information: bumps in the road. 2019 has already seen…