Features

As Switzerland passes wide-scale tax reform, local tax authorities are increasingly focusing on intangibles and intellectual property (IP) audits as part of a two-pronged approach in tackling tax evasion. Tax Partner’s Caterina Colling-Russo and René Matteotti discuss the focus.

After Swiss tax reform failed to secure public support in 2017, lawmakers have revised key tenants to ensure it passes when it goes to a second referendum, this time in May 2019. Lenz & Staehelin’s Jean-Blaise Eckert and Frédéric Neukomm discuss the potential impact on corporations and shareholders.

As Switzerland harmonises its corporate tax regime with international standards, the number of available tax incentives for businesses will diminish, while the effective tax rate will rise. EY Switzerland’s Kersten Honold and Kilian Bürgi discuss how cantonal ‘tax holidays’ provide an alternative to maintain rates below 10%.

Switzerland receives an unprecedented number of information exchange requests every year by foreign countries. Burckhardt Law’s Rolf Wüthrich explores how the private banking state is amending its exchange obligations around share rights and corporate ownership in a bid to harmonise its laws with international norms.

Most banks make it a policy not to provide tax advisory services, even though there are no regulatory prohibitions to do so in Switzerland, the UK or US. But as tax considerations become increasingly important in any investment strategy, Deloitte Switzerland’s Brandi Caruso and Karim Schubiger discuss the viability of banks providing such an explicit value-add.

Energy multinationals have complex, international supply chains that contract a host of specialist companies in the process of bringing vital commodities to market, making intellectual property attribution ambiguous. In this primer, Deloitte’s Nick Gaudioso, Randy Price, Nadim Rahman and John Wells give an overview of the energy excavation and production process to understand the tax ramifications.