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…
One of the most polemical tax measures in Colombia’s recent taxation history has undoubtedly been the introduction of the Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). Loved by the public administration but hated by the taxpayers, this tax highlights the very difficult problem of whether it is possible to combine both a high degree of efficiency and an…
In my previous post, I discussed the budget law related reform updates in China. This post continues such discussion by reviewing issues of China’s tax administration and transfer payment systems. Tax Administration and Collection China’s tax administration and collection system is unique in two ways. First, over 70% of the tax revenue is generated through…
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…
GIIN Lists Analysis: June 2014 through March 2015 In the words of my English colleague Haydon Perryman, March was a “bit of a damp squib”. Financial institution FATCA registrations have slowed to a trickle with only 2,479 additional ones seeking a GIIN, bringing the ultimate total to 156,276. Of this total, the UK and its…
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,…
Two cases recently discussed by the European Court of Justice provide a welcome opportunity to use this space for a quick review of the status of foreign loss relief under EU law. The first is the decision in Commission v UK (C-172/13, ECLI:EU:C:2015:50), delivered by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice on 3…
“When the map and the territory don’t agree, always believe the territory” Gause and Weinberg – describing Swedish Army Training Easier said than done Tax risk management in Africa reminds me of how the first explorers having to navigate the new world must have felt. Not having any decent maps and often creating their own…
The taxation of MNEs is widely debated. This is even more so with respect to MNE’s tax planning arrangements. Increasingly, however, it seems that politicians and the media are not paying enough attention to facts in the debate. Recently we have witnessed examples in my home country of this tendency. These examples are the reason…
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…
The OECD Public Discussion Draft on BEPS Action 14 (released on 18 December 2014) covers extensively dispute resolution mechanisms and ways to make them more effective. The subject has grown in importance as Mutual Agreement Procedures (“MAP”) have increased significantly especially on transfer pricing cross border adjustments. In this context, the BEPS Discussion Draft states…
