Large employers in the United States that fail to provide minimum health coverage for employees will not be subject to the shared-responsibility penalty until 2015 after the US Treasury Department announced that it would delay certain provisions of 2010’s health-care reform legislation.
The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted 123–63 against debating a bill that would have created a legal basis for Swiss banks to resolve tax evasion disputes with the United States.
Japan’s National Tax Agency announced that it has received “a substantial amount of data” from the Australian Taxation Office about entities related to Japanese taxpayers that are located in so-called tax havens.
In a unanimous decision, the US Supreme Court held that the United Kingdom’s windfall profits tax imposed on newly privatised businesses was creditable against US taxes under Section 901 of the Internal Revenue Code.
The OECD has some advice for multinational corporations: If you are more forthcoming in disclosing your tax positions, you can expect more certainty in their tax treatment.
Ahead of a meeting of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council and the European Council, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso announced that the commission will propose an expansion of the automatic exchange provisions of the Council Directive 2011/16/EU to cover “all relevant types of income”.
The IRS announced that it, the Australian Tax Office, and HM Revenue and Customs have obtained information about a large number of trusts and companies holding assets on behalf of residents throughout the world and plan to share that information with other countries’ tax authorities.
As part of its on-going efforts to help countries conduct transfer-pricing risk assessments, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a draft of a new transfer-pricing risk-assessment handbook.
In response to reports that tax evasion costs EU member countries up to €1 trillion a year, Algirdas Šemeta, European Commissioner for Taxation, Customs, Statistics, Audit and Anti-fraud, announced the establishment of a Platform for Tax Good Governance.
While many countries have made progress in increasing tax transparency over the past few years, some countries continue to have “serious deficiencies.”
The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) ruled that Latvia could not refuse to assign a VAT identification number to a company on the ground that the company would not be able to carry out the declared economic activity for which it was requesting the number.
A recent decision of the US Tax Court illustrates the surprising tax results that can ensnare US expatriates as a result of the United States’s worldwide tax regime.
A low corporate tax rate alone is not enough for a majority of companies worldwide to pull up stakes and relocate their business to another country, research by Grant Thornton International suggests. Instead, they favour lowering the corporate tax rate in their own country.
Proposed higher taxes in the 2013–14 budget proposed by Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on February 28th have caused concern amongst foreign investors and companies in India. If approved, the budget would take effect April 1st 2013.
The proposed package of European bank reform measures, known as the Capital Requirements Directive Four (CRD4), could be a boon to European tax authorities, giving them a clearer view of when banks attempt to shift profits out of country to avoid tax, observers say.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced that, at its January 2013 meeting, its Committee on Fiscal Affairs (CFA) approved a standardised international system for information reporting and claiming reduced tax withholding on portfolio investments.
