About the book The growing importance of the intangible assets in the global economy coupled with expanding international intra-firm trade, has meant that transfer pricing issues concerning intangibles have assumed critical importance for both the Multi National Enterprises as well as Tax authorities. The identification, accounting & valuation of intangibles is a challenging and evolving field. This volume details the various such issues and concerns from both industry and revenue perspective. Further, the contemporary issues of digital economy, tax planning, BEPS, GAAR have also been extensively dealt with. Key features · Explains in detail the meaning of various types of intangibles as defined in Income Tax Act. · Discusses the various possible methodologies for valuing the intangibles including the typical and residual methods · Accounts for all the relevant changes suggested by the OECD in the BEPS Action Point 8-10 report regarding intangibles · Valuation of Highly Uncertain as well Hard-to-Value Intangibles · Relevant Features of and taxation challenges posed by Digital economy · Various possible techniques of Tax Planning adopted by the Multi-national Enterprises · All the BEPS Action Point Reports along with recommendations as adopted globally as well as in India including Thin Capitalisation, PoEM, Equalisation Levy, amended DTAAs with Mauritius, Cyprus & Singapore {Updated upto Finance Bill, 2017 (India)} · Transfer Pricing Aspects of CCAs, Intra-group Services & Business Restructuring including issue of indirect transfers · Discussion on General Anti Avoidance Rules, to be implemented in India from 01/04/2017 · Famous and important global and Indian case laws with regard to intangibles · Detailed discussion on issue of AMP expenses & marketing intangibles

General anti-avoidance rules (GAARs) have been a topic of great relevance in practice as well as in academia for decades. In a post-BEPS tax world, with national legislators introducing or tightening GAARs, and with the European Union and OECD suggesting implementation of such rules, the topic seems more important than ever. The aim of this book is to give tax policymakers, tax authorities, tax courts and tax practitioners an idea of the various understandings of and approaches towards tax avoidance in 39 countries.

Présentation de l'éditeur : "This book discusses the legal meaning of tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning in 23 EU and non-EU jurisdictions and analyses the repercussions of the BEPS initiatives on those concepts. It further discusses (i) whether there is a supranational meaning of tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning, both at the OECD/G20 and EU levels; (ii) the role played by transfer pricing rules in tax avoidance; and (iii) consistency and hierarchy among the BEPS initiatives. National reports examine the response to tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning in individual jurisdictions, taking into account the OECD/G20 BEPS recommendations and the European Union's reactions. They also give notice of general anti-avoidance rules, special anti-avoidance rules and transfer pricing rules in force in each jurisdiction, analyse their meaning and scope, and trace the interactions among them. The national reports are accompanied by a general report, along with four thematic reports covering the main topics discussed during the 2016 EATLP Congress, held in Munich."

The OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project promises to make effective inroads into the much criticized corporate tax strategy known as aggressive transfer pricing, whereby the profitability of subsidiaries in different jurisdictions is “managed” via mispricing with the intent of minimizing the corporation’s overall tax burden. Although the OECD BEPS project is an ongoing endeavor, its accomplishments to date and developing trends are discernible. This book, including contributions by outstanding and renowned transfer pricing experts both from practice and academia, analyses these trends, and proposes reforms which would ensure that transfer pricing outcomes are better aligned with economic activities and value creation, which achieves a more equitable distribution of profits among different countries. Each chapter is dedicated to specific sections of the OECD’s BEPS Action Plan. Among the topics and issues covered are the following: – arm’s length principle and its ongoing development; – allocation of risk and recharacterization; – intangibles (both license model and cost contribution arrangements); – interest deductions and intra-group financing; – low value-adding services; – commissionaire arrangements and low-risk distributors; – attribution of profits to permanent establishments; – documentation requirements (including Country-by-Country Reporting). Within these topics, measures to identify the commercial and financial relationships inside multinational enterprises, to accurately delineate actual transactions, as well as guidance on defining risk and its allocation among entities of a multinational enterprise are discussed. The book is based on papers presented and discussed at the first Global Transfer Pricing Conference hosted in February 2016 by the WU Transfer Pricing Center at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business). The most up-to-date and thorough consideration of transfer pricing yet published, this book will prove invaluable for all parties currently facing questions related to transfer pricing in a post-BEPS world, especially those in charge of finding an ideal answer to them: academics, practitioners (including in-house and advisory counsel), international organizations, CEOs and CFOs of multinational enterprises, and government officials who are tax and transfer pricing experts.

This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral and corporate inversions. Moreover, it performs a meta analysis of the extensive literature that estimates the overall size of profit shifting. We find that the literature suggests that, on average, a 1 percentage-point lower corporate tax rate will expand before-tax income by 1 percent—an effect that is larger than reported as the consensus estimate in previous surveys and tends to be increasing over time. The literature on tax avoidance still has several unresolved puzzles and blind spots that require further research.

International tax regimes and practices are heavily criticized for failing to fairly levy corporate tax on giant multinational taxpayers in the current globalized and digitalized world. This important and far-seeing book demonstrates how formulary apportionment (FA) – an approach by which a multinational corporation pays each jurisdiction’s corporate tax based on the share of its worldwide income allocated to that jurisdiction – can achieve the much-sought goal of aligning value creation and taxation. The author, through an intensive analysis of the European Union’s (EU’s) Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) Directive Proposal(s) and comparison to the United States (US’s) formulary apportionment experience, shows how the perceived problems with an FA system can be overcome and lays out the necessary elements for its feasibility. With detailed attention to the debates around formulary apportionment and its theoretical foundations, the book provides a blueprint for rebuilding the normative framework for the EU’s tax reform by clearly analysing the implications of the following and more: theorising public benefits to be represented by taxation; reorganising different economic theories about tax neutrality and tax justice; advancing the comparative legal research methodology to analyse law reform by combining the functional approach and the problem-solving approach; designing the logical formulary apportionment system for digital economy; ensuring the removal of the incentive for multinationals to shift reported income to low-tax locations; reducing the tax system’s complexity and the administrative burden it imposes on firms; eliminating transfer pricing complexity for intra-firm transactions; achieving equal weighting of the sales factor, the labour factor, and the asset factor in the formula; application of ‘destination-based’ rule for attributing the sales factor; and replacing the traditional permanent establishment nexus with a ‘factor presence nexus’. The presentation incorporates extensive comparison between the EU’s formulary apportionment tax reform option and FA systems existing in the United States (US) at state level, including reference to relevant US case law and legislation. As a possible option to address the problem of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), formulary apportionment is gaining increasing acceptance and attention. This book will prove invaluable to taxation authorities, tax practitioners, and scholars in its deeply informed and systematic guidance on good practices and prevention of problematic experiences in establishing and implementing an effective and market-neutral FA system.