Addressing the tax challenges arising from the digitalization of the economy has been a top priority of the OECD since 2015.  In January 2019, the OECD agreed to examine proposals in two pillars.  Pillar One is focused on nexus and profit allocation whereas Pillar Two is focused on global minimum tax.  In July 2020 the OECD was mandated to produce reports on the Blueprints of Pillar One and Pillar Two by October 2020. According to…

Last week, the IRS issued new guidance that addresses “telescoping” in mutual agreement procedure (“MAP”) and advance pricing agreement (“APA”) cases. Very generally, the guidance disallows (subject to a $10 million materiality exception) telescoping for tax years starting in 2018, when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) came into effect, while continuing to allow telescoping for pre-2018 years in appropriate cases. According to the IRS’s Advance Pricing and Mutual Agreement (“APMA”) program, the new…

As discussed in a recent blog post, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (“IRAS”) has been issuing guidance on the impact of COVID-19 on transfer pricing issues. This week, IRAS issued new forward-looking guidance on (i) the tax residency status of companies and (ii) permanent establishments. This guidance is temporary and applies for the 2021 tax year.…

Hold on a second. Cost sharing is a tax shelter? For over five decades, cost sharing has been a transfer pricing structure endorsed by Congress, regulated by Treasury and the OECD, agreed to by the IRS and foreign tax authorities alike, and widely embraced by taxpayers. How can it be a “tax shelter”? And yet that is precisely the headline from a recent district court decision in the Western District of Washington. How did this…

In February 2018, the OECD and Brazil started a joint project to analyze the similarities and differences between Brazilian legislation and the transfer pricing (“TP”) frameworks to assess cross-border transactions between associated enterprises from a tax standpoint. This project is within the scope of Brazil’s initiative to engage with the OECD in tax-related projects, and, in a broader respects, consistent with Brazil’s interest in initiating the process to join the OECD.…

In February 2020, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”) released Transfer Pricing Guidance on Financial Transactions (“Guidance”). The Guidance is significant because it is the first time that the OECD’s Transfer Pricing Guidelines have been updated to include guidance on the transfer pricing aspects of financial transactions. The use of a cash pool is popular among multinational enterprises as a way of achieving more efficient cash management by bringing together, either physically or…

The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (“IRAS”) has issued transfer pricing guidelines for companies affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes guidance on documentation requirements, term-testing for related party transactions and Advance Pricing Arrangements (“APA”).…