Last week, the US Treasury released long-awaited proposed regulations on the corporate alternative minimum tax or “CAMT.” In a press release, Treasury estimated “that around 100 of the largest and most profitable companies will pay the CAMT annually.” According to Janet Yellen, the new rules will help combat “egregious U.S. corporate tax avoidance” that has led, in her view, to artificially low tax liabilities. Transfer pricing practitioners take note: one tool that Treasury plans to use in this effort to combat “abuse” is Section 482.
The preamble to the proposed regulations expresses concern “that taxpayers may enter into transactions with related parties or enter into other transactions or arrangements in order to avoid the application of CAMT or to improperly reduce CAMT liability.” The fix, according to Treasury, is to “require income, expense, gain, or loss arising from transactions between commonly controlled CAMT entities to be clearly reflected for purposes of the CAMT, consistent with the principles of section 482 of the Code.”
For a regulatory package that is over 600 pages long, the proposed regulations are surprisingly cryptic on how taxpayers should apply the “principles” of section 482 to determine CAMT liability. Proposed regulation section 1.56A-26(d) provides a single example where a domestic parent sells self-created intangibles to its foreign subsidiary. In the example, the “CAMT basis in the intangible property is appropriately adjusted” under section 482 principles.
But the vagueness on this issue might be a feature, rather than a bug. We have detected a shift in the IRS’s thinking away from viewing section 482 as a technical compliance provision and toward thinking of it as a broad anti-abuse rule. To be sure, combatting abuse has always been one of the IRS’s concerns: Indeed, the 1988 White Paper documented how the section 482 rules were developed over time to “into far-reaching weapons to attack a variety of tax abuses.” But that type of thinking has been increasingly prominent recently. And, if the point here is to combat “abuse,” technical rules explaining in detail the application of section 482 to the CAMT regime might, in the IRS’s view, work at cross purposes with the agency’s objective.
In any event, for companies potentially subject to the CAMT, this development will likely present yet another compliance headache. As tax departments digest this massive package of proposed regulations, they should be sure to include their transfer pricing practitioners in the conversation.