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…
An important question in the context of the recovery of fiscal state aid, is how the amount of the tax advantage to be recovered should be calculated. Recently, the Dutch legislator released a draft legislative proposal on the recovery of state aid. The starting point taken in this draft proposal is that the taxpayer should…
This has been an interesting session and for those who were not there, I am sure that the essence is reported elsewhere in the international tax press. The deliberations lead me to the following additional thoughts. 1. As a remedy for even starting disputes: tax authorities should not take positions in making adjustments that they…
Random thoughts on presumptions on accuracy It is a fact that most in-house tax professionals know very little about their group’s financial systems. E.g. very few know whether their companies deduct discounts from gross sales or from net sales; likewise very few know whether there are any employee expenses included in cost of goods sold…
Introduction. I have been actively supporting an EU based corporate income tax to reflect the single internal market rather than a fragmented framework with 28 competing tax laws. I’ve done so since the early 1990’s, after the publication of the Ruding Report (following earlier proposals by eg. Van den Tempel). The CCCTB approach as introduced…
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…
Much has been written – and probably even more has been said – about the different consequences of the Brexit vote. This is hardly a surprise: the decision is a first in the history of the European Union, and despite the existence of the nowadays (in?) famous Article 50, one still has trouble understanding how…
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…
If the UK leaves the EU, this would have immediate consequences for direct taxation.[1] We saw in the first post that the EU fundamental freedoms, EU provisions on State aid and EU directives and regulations (also those on direct taxation) would automatically cease to apply to the UK. Referring back to the second post on…
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…
To withdraw from the European Union, the EU and the UK will need to negotiate a “divorce agreement” (see our first post here). Following this, a so-called Second Agreement could be negotiated between the EU and the UK. This new agreement will deal with trade relations between the EU and the UK. In this post…
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” – Brothers Grimm, “Snow White” Where it all started Tax evolved like many things in the world we experience today. Taxes were already levied during the various reins of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The earliest taxes in Rome were customs duties on imports and exports…
