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…
Written by Associate Professor, PhD Anders N. Laursen, Department of Law, Aarhus University and Technical Advisor to CORIT Advisory On June 4th 2015 the High Court of Eastern Denmark decided to refer a case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concerning the Danish mandatory group taxation regime. Also in June 2015, the Commission issued…
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…
China has made vast strides in environmental protection in the past decade. The Decision further indicates that “ecological civilization” a key development goal for China. Various schemes are being tried to curb harmful emissions, for example, a cap-and-trade system is already up and running in Shenzhen, Guangdong, and is slated to expand into six other…
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…
Please contact us to assist in our research Prof. William Byrnes & Haydon Perryman In 2011, HMRC forecast that it would receive “billions” from the Swiss Disclosure Facility. In 2012, HMRC stated that this number would be five billion sterling, and another three billion sterling from the Liechtenstein Disclosure Facility (LDF). This implies that at least a couple hundred thousand United Kingdom tax…
Attacking Profit Shifting by Prof. Jeffery Kadet (Abstract) In recent years the financial press has turned increasing attention to MNCs that shift income to low taxed jurisdictions overseas in order to avoid US taxation. What’s generally missing from these discussions is any serious focus on possible IRS attacks on these companies, most of which are CFCs. There’s little…
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…
FFI GIIN List FATCA Monthly Update The IRS released the fourteenth FATCA GIIN list of foreign financial institutions (FFIs) that have registered with the IRS through its FATCA portal. The IRS provides these FFIs a Global Intermediary Identification Number (GIIN). The FFI may then use its unique 19 digit GIIN to complete the IRS tax…
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…
