There are a lot of opinions on multinationals and their tax practices. One conventional perception is that multinationals have a general tax advantage over their domestic competitors as their international operations allow for substantial tax management to minimize the corporate tax burden at group level. A number of tax policy projects are in process and…
Following my latest post on the Court of Justice’s decision in Commission v UK (C-172/13, ECLI:EU:C:2015:50), I want to turn in this comment on the related issue of currency losses, which was recently addressed by Advocate General Kokott in her Opinion in case X AB v Skatteverket (C-686/13, ECLI:EU:C:2015:31). The Advocate General concludes that Member…
This month’s Haydon Perryman and William Byrnes FATCA Update post starts with a tip-of-the-hat to my FATCA and CRS research colleague Haydon Perryman who has just moved to UBS Investment Bank where he will be responsible for global regulatory reporting of FATCA and the CRS. Haydon Perryman summed up the decline in GIIN registration during April:…
This contribution is aimed at surveying the interaction and reciprocal influence between the OECD-G20 BEPS Action Plan (the BEPS Plan), on one hand, and contemporary tax developments occurred in the Latin American (LATAM) region, particularly those geared to counteract base eroding and profit shifting moves by multinational enterprises (MNEs), on the other. At first glance,…
Tax treaty rules to resolve the dual residence of persons other than individuals have been consistent since the 1963 OECD draft convention. Such dual residence in resolved by Article 4(3) of the OECD and UN Model Treaties in favour of the place of effective management. Only a very few states have noted reservations on this…
The ministers signed a Supplementary Agreement (SA) amending the French-German Double Taxation Convention. The SA simplifies the taxation for pensioners by attributing the exclusive taxing right for pension payments from statutory social insurance to the resident state of the beneficiary of these payments. In return Germany and France agreed to mutually sustain the other side’s…
The claim for the so-called “single taxation principle”, in spite of its doubtful general acceptance, seems to have been acknowledged by the OECD, which has moved from a position whereby countries should explicitly state the limits of the application of tax treaties in case of abuse, to an opposite view ascertaining that tax treaty protection…
Reform Path Forward for China’s Tax Law Reform The observation on the current fiscal and tax system helps China to improve and execute a profound tax system to realize goals proposed in The Decision as well as tackling new challenges arising therefrom. Fiscal and tax policies do not stand alone and must follow the…
GIIN Lists Analysis: June 2014 through April 2015 April’s global GIIN registrations, like March, were unimpressive. Financial institution GIIN total registrations ticked up from an unimpressive 2,479 additional ones in March to 3,734 in April, bringing the ultimate GIIN count to 160,010 from the March result of 156,276. The 112 IGA signatories, and IGA agreements…
Let’s go back a few weeks, to March 18, 2015. The EU Commission announces its much heralded Tax Transparency package. The package contains a surprise element: the link to the Code of Conduct Report of 1999. To refresh memories: this report, lead by a UK national, contained 66 harmful tax measures. The 66 could be…
On April 8th, the Labour Party has pledged to abolish the British preferential tax rules for non-domiciled individuals (non-doms), should it win the general election on May 7th. This long overdue move would be a big step towards equitable tax treatment of individuals, notably in the Common Market in Europe. If individuals had been included…
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…
The world is following with attention the developments of one of the major all-time corruption scandals, involving one of the symbols of the Brazilian economy, Petrobras. If it was not enough fuzz, now the Federal tax authorities are facing another problem, which is rumor of corruption within the Administrative Court of Federal Tax Appeals (“CARF”)….
It is well known that case law from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) imposes limitations on the application of anti-avoidance rules by Member States. Accordingly, it is of vital importance that recommendations made under the OECD project on base erosion on profit shifting (the BEPS project), are adaptable, where necessary, to enable Member States…
