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Pascal Saint-Amans and Grace Perez-Navarro comment on the impact the work on the BEPS Action Plan has made over the past two years and thank the staff of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration (CTPA) at the OECD for their efforts.

Bob van der Made On October 21 2015 the European Commission (EC) announced in a press release the adoption of final decisions in the formal state aid investigations into transfer pricing agreements between a Dutch Starbucks entity, Starbucks Manufacturing BV (SMBV), and the Netherlands, and Fiat Finance and Trade (FFT) and Luxembourg.

In its push towards positioning India as an attractive investment destination and to improve the ease of doing business in the country, the Government has announced further tax initiatives.

The 2013 Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (the BEPS Action Plan) identified treaty abuse, and in particular treaty shopping, as one of the most important sources of BEPS concerns. Jacques Sasseville and Edward Barret look at the work done to counter the unintended uses of tax treaties in an international context.

The lack of timely, comprehensive and relevant information on aggressive tax planning strategies is one of the main challenges faced by tax authorities worldwide. Early access to such information provides the opportunity to quickly respond to tax risks through informed risk assessment, audits, or changes to legislation or regulations. Youngnoh Kim explains how mandatory disclosure rules will facilitate this.

Tax treaties generally provide that the business profits of a non-resident enterprise are taxable in a state only to the extent that the non-resident enterprise has a permanent establishment (PE) in that state to which such profits are attributable. The PE definition included in tax treaties thus provides a crucial threshold to determine whether a non-resident enterprise must pay income tax on its business income in another state, explain Jacques Sasseville and Edward Barret.

The effective implementation of the arm’s-length principle is closely linked to the availability of information. In transfer pricing, the asymmetry of information between taxpayers and tax administrations can be acute, potentially opening opportunities for BEPS. For this reason, the BEPS Action Plan stressed the need to enhance transparency in general, and for transfer pricing purposes in particular. Andrew Hickman, Samia Abdelghani and Paul Hondius explain these enhancements in the context of Action 13.

Jesse Eggert, Liz Chien, and Eric Robert explain why the digital economy cannot be ring-fenced for tax purposes.

The BEPS package was unveiled on October 5 2015 and endorsed by the G20 finance ministers at their meeting a few days later in Lima and by the G20 leaders at their November summit in Antalya. A little more than two years earlier, the OECD and G20 countries embarked on a significant re-write of the international tax rules to ensure that profits are taxed where economic activities are carried out and value is created. The BEPS package comprises reports on each of the 15 actions identified in the BEPS Action Plan, which was released in July 2013 and on the basis of which the BEPS Project was launched in September of that year. In this overview article David Bradbury, Achim Pross, Marlies de Ruiter, and Raffaele Russo take stock of what has been achieved over the last two years and look to the new challenges ahead. The following articles contain a detailed overview of each of the 15 actions.

The idea of substantial activity is central to the work on harmful tax practices, as Kate Ramm explains.