Transfer Pricing in BEPS: First Round — Business Interests Win (But, Not in Knock-Out)

Abstract

Reforming the transfer pricing regime is not merely one of many equal tasks faced by the BEPS initiative; it is its core task. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has responded to the challenge with an ambitious plan to reform the substantive transfer pricing rules so that they could realistically meet the challenges of sophisticated tax planning - particularly of transactions involving intangibles - and to standardize reporting to reduce compliance and enforcement costs for all stakeholders. On September 2014 the OECD has delivered only partially on these promises, progressing very little on the substantive reform front, yet meeting the not less important goal of standardizing transfer pricing reporting. The article takes a critical look at the progress of the BEPS project in the transfer pricing area, and makes recommendations to support the OECD's original intentions as articulated in the initial Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) reports.