The National Association of Business Economics (“NABE”) hosted its Transfer Pricing Symposium from July 16-18, 2019, in Washington DC. The Symposium was conducted by NABE’s Transfer Pricing Roundtable co-chaired by Jill Weise, Global Head of Duff & Phelps’ Transfer Pricing practice. The Symposium gathered leading transfer pricing professionals from business, government and consulting firms.
Topics at this year’s Symposium included the Advance Pricing and Mutual Agreement Program’s (“APMA”) Functional Cost Diagnostics (“FCD”) Workbook, recent IRS Guidance with respect to BEAT, GILTI, FDII and Captive Services, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (“OECD”) discussion draft on financial transactions, and the impacts of Tax Reform and BEPS on economic analyses conducted for transfer pricing purposes.
The first panel at the Symposium was moderated by Jill Weise and it addressed the APMA FCD Workbook. The IRS representatives John Hughes and Rob Liu discussed the ways in which the FCD model was intended to be used (and ways that it was not intended to be used), noting that it was not the intention of the APMA program to signal a broadening usage of profit split approaches where they were not warranted.
Stefanie Perrella from the Duff & Phelps New York transfer pricing practice participated on a panel with other tax professionals, including Christopher Bello, a representative from the IRS to discuss the OECD discussion draft on the transfer pricing aspects of financial transactions. The panelists addressed the following topics:
- The status of the financial transactions draft and its expected finalization date as well as what to expect from a content perspective in the final draft;
- Debt characterization and interaction with Section D.1 of Chapter 1 of the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines; and
- Group credit ratings and effects of group affiliation and guarantees in assessing intercompany loan pricing.
Daniel Nir from the Duff & Phelps Boston transfer pricing practice moderated a panel that addressed the question, “What are companies focusing on in terms of economic analyses after tax reform and BEPS?” The panel addressed the following:
- Economic analyses being performed in response to (1) the current regulatory status of key US international tax provisions enacted as part of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (i.e., BEAT, FDII, GILIT) and (2) BEPS;
- Planning for future changes to address the new digital economy proposals, DEMPE and profit splits, and the uncertainty around recent U.S. tax reform changes; and
- Operational transfer pricing and the growing use of technology solutions to establish transfer prices for individual products and services.
The Symposium website offers a link to the full program and the materials presented at the conference.
