This is the question many non-government organisations (NGO) are asking but, in a panel called A New World Order at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise’s international tax conference in Stockholm yesterday, Jeffrey Owens, director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration at the OECD, and Michael Lennard, chief of International Tax Cooperation and Trade Financing at the UN, said it is not as simple as that.
None of the other panellists, which included Indian and Brazilian tax officials and practitioners and executives active in OECD’s tax work, disputed this.
“They [NGOs] only say these things for the headlines,” Owens said.
Owens said the OECD is interested in the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and other developing nations because this is where the growth is and the number of multinational enterprises in the Brics countries is increasing.
Lennard said the UN is trying to help developing countries to incorporate and work with the OECD transfer pricing guidelines.
“But we have to remember that the transfer pricing rules were developed by a small group of countries quite a while ago,” he added.
Both Owens and Lennard emphasised the work that the OECD and the UN share
“It would be a shame if, because of some of the pressure from NGOs, that [relationship] would go away,” Owens said.
The panel, which also included Chris Lenon, chairman of the tax advisory committee of the OECD’s Business and Industry Committee (BIAC), Philip Baker QC of Gray’s Inn Tax Chambers in London, Anita Kapur of the Indian Revenue Service and Fernando Mombelli of the Brazilian Federal Revenue, was chaired by Krister Andersson, the head of the tax policy group of Business Europe. They highlighted how developing nations are gaining more prominence in tax policy development and economic affairs.
“While there is a lot of debate about what will be the new world order, the OECD versus the UN is not a football match,” Baker said.
