We have made a submission to the Subcommittee on Article 9 (Transfer Pricing) of the UN Committee of Tax Experts, available here. We suggest that it should focus on article 9 and develop alternatives to the OECD’s approach that focuses on transactions and functional analysis and is subjective and resource-intensive, creating problems for both taxpayers and revenue authorities, especially in developing countries.

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We have made a submission to the Platform for Collaboration on Tax’s consultation on the revised version of its proposed Toolkit on the taxation of sales of assets using offshore entities. Our submission, available here, restates and reinforces the argument that the Toolkit should not be tied to the archaic legalistic distinction between immovable and movable assets, but should include the transfer of a business as a going concern, treated as transferring location-specific assets.

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The BEPS Monitoring Group has made a submission to the OECD consultation on the Transfer Pricing Aspects of Financial Transactions. It is available here, and suggests that the draft should have more urgency given the key role that financial structures play in tax avoidance by MNEs, as pointed out in the BEPS Action 4 report. Regrettably, the recommendations in that report would still allow excessive deductions for most MNEs in most industry sectors, so that strong transfer pricing rules will remain important, and we argue for simplified methods that would be both effective and easy to apply.

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