India signs 11 more APAs to reduce tax disputes

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The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has signed 11 more advance pricing agreements (APAs) with MNCs on Tuesday, taking the total number of such deals that would spare them from rigorous tax audits under certain conditions to 31 so far. Of this, 22 were signed this year. The department had earlier set an internal target of about 150 APAs for this year, mostly with US-based companies in the IT and ITeS sector to avoid future tax disputes. So far, it has covered about a fifth of this target. Experts expect that clearing all APA requests, applying their terms to similar past transactions and resolving disputes with foreign tax authorities under the Mutual Agreement Procedure would clear most of the accumulated cross-border tax disputes amounting to Rs 2.7 lakh crore. Till now about 45 tax disputes are resolved under the MAP procedure.

APA is an agreement between the tax authority and companies on the principles of valuation of certain transactions, which if adhered to will exempt the company from tax audits on cross-border deals. The tax disputes which the government may have with the companies on similar transactions in previous years too would be resolved by applying similar agreed upon value to past transactions. The move is part of the government’s efforts to reduce tax litigation.

According to sources, most of the APAs signed on Tuesday relate to service provider companies in the investment advisory and ITeS sectors. “The effort of the APA authorities is impressive. A lot of hard work has gone into analysing these cases and getting them to a closure,” said Vijay Iyer, Partner & National Leader for Transfer Pricing, EY which was involved in five of the 11 pacts on Tuesday.

While an APA between a company and the tax department will resolve a dispute in India, the possibility of double taxation would be fully addressed only when the tax authority in the company’s home country too becomes party to such agreement. America, which is home to many technology firms facing tax disputes in India, has recently started steps to implement such ‘bilateral APAs.’

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/article/economy/india-signs-11-more-apas-to-reduce-tax-disputes/170136/

Income tax mop-up from Mumbai rises 20% to Rs 1.14 trillion

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Income TaxIncome tax collection from the Mumbai region has gone up by over 20 per cent as of November 21 over the year-ago period.
The region, which mops up more than one-third of the total direct tax, has collected Rs. 1.14 trillion (Rs 1,14,000 crore) as of November 21, up from Rs. 0.95 trillion in the year-ago period, showing a growth by 20.17 per cent, Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax and Head of Mumbai region DS Saksena told PTI.
The department is hopeful of achieving its projected collection of Rs. 2.56 trillion for the fiscal by March from Mumbai region alone, he added.

Against this, indirect taxes have been doing much better with the collection till September rising over 35.8 per cent to over Rs. 3.24 trillion in the first half of the current fiscal, reflecting growth in economic activity against Rs. 2.38 trillion.
Saksena said while advance tax collection from the region rose only 6.47 per cent to Rs. 58,000 crore during the period, up from Rs. 54,761 crore a year ago, TDS collections rose 10 per cent to Rs. 53,062 crore from Rs. 48,223 crore.
Saksena attributed the rise in collections to the uptick in the performance of industries and “given the trend so far, we are quite hopeful of achieving the target of Rs. 2.56 trillion.”

For the entire country, which comprises 17 regions, income tax collections as on November 21 stood at Rs. 3.63 trillion against a budget estimate of Rs. 7.97 trillion for the full year.
Nationally advance tax mop up rose to Rs. 1.42 trillion from Rs. 1.34 trillion in the year-ago period and thus showing a growth of 6.5 per cent.
Similarly, TDS amounting to Rs. 1.95 trillion was collected from the entire country during the period, showing a growth by 11.33 per cent over the year-ago period’s collections at Rs. 1.75 trillion.

The growth rate in collection during the first half of 2015—16 is double the budget requirement of 18.8 per cent for the full fiscal.
Bulk of the growth in the indirect taxes has been contributed by excise duty collection, which grew 69.6 per cent during the period. Excise collection during April—September over Rs. 1.25 trillion, as against Rs. 74,019 crore in the same period last fiscal, while Customs mop up grew 17.5 per cent to over Rs. 1.03 trillion during the six months and service tax grew 24.3 per cent to Rs. 95,493 crore.

The government has budgeted to collect over Rs. 6.47 trillion from indirect taxes in the current fiscal, a growth of 18.8 per cent over last fiscal.

Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/income-tax-mopup-from-mumbai-rises-20-to-rs-114-trillion/article7912856.ece

Govt to further simplify ITR forms, sets up committee

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The government is looking to further simplify income tax return forms to help taxpayers fill them without seeking help from experts and the revenue department has set up a committee in this regard.

The committee, according to sources, will be headed by a joint secretary level officer and would include chartered accountants and tax experts.

“The tax department is trying to further simplify the return form so that no outside help is needed by those who want to file returns on their own,” a source said.

The effort would be to come out with a simple formula for indexation to help assessees compute capital gains on sale of assets, the source added.

“The Committee would also look into the possibility of reducing the number of pages in the return form,” the source said.

The Income Tax department had in June come out with a simplified tax return form for salaried class. Filers now have to disclose the total number of savings and the current bank accounts held by them at any time during the previous year (excluding dormant accounts).

The form also has space to fill up the IFSC code of the bank and in an additional feature, tax filers have been given an option to indicate their bank accounts in which they would want their refund credited. The ITR also has sought the Aadhaar number of filers.

The tax department had come out with simplified ITR after experts raised objections to the 14 page form which was notified earlier in the year.

The earlier form sought details of bank accounts and foreign visits and following controversy, the Revenue Department announced putting them on hold.

Source: http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/govt-to-further-simplify-itr-forms-sets-up-committee-115112200147_1.html

Finance Ministry to ease transfer pricing rules

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The finance ministry is streamlining safe harbour rules and advance agreements, two mechanisms to determine the price of services rendered by a multinational to its subsidiary in India.

Safe harbour rules – directives on margins the tax authorities should accept for the transfer price declared by an assessee – have drawn a tepid response since they were introduced a couple of years ago. There is also a huge backlog in advance pricing agreements (APAs), an ahead-of-time understanding between a taxpayer and the tax authority on an appropriate transfer pricing methodology.

ALIGNING INDIAN TAXATION WITH BEST PRACTICES
Safe harbour rules

  • Government looking at lowering safe harbour margins to make it attractive for companies to opt for it
  • Government to make safe harbour definition unambiguous bringing in more clarity

Advance Pricing Agreement

  • With close to 550 cases pending, government looking at expediting clearances through:
  • Sector-specific approach to cases
  • Increasing manpower and filling up vacancies

The move would simplify the tax regime, reduce litigation and help improve the business environment, a finance ministry official said.

The steps will involve lowering the margins in safe harbour rules and definitions will be reworked to remove ambiguities. India announced the safe harbour rules in 2013, but the high margins of up to 25 per cent on total operational profits have made it unattractive for companies to use them.

“We are addressing issues related to transfer pricing to align it with best practices. We are revising the safe harbour rules that will include revisiting the definition and revising the margins, considered high by companies,” said a tax official.

Information technology (IT) and information technology-enabled services (ITeS) companies with transactions of up to Rs 500 crore have a safe harbour operating margin of 20 per cent and those with transactions above Rs 500 crore have a margin of 22 per cent. Knowledge process outsourcing companies have a safe harbour operating margin of 25 per cent.

Experts argue there is ambiguity in the definition of IT, ITeS and knowledge process outsourcing companies with a lot of overlap. Moreover, the margins decided in tribunals or in advance pricing agreements turn out much lower, ranging between 15 and 18 per cent.

“The definitions under the safe harbour rules are fuzzy and sometimes overlap, creating confusion over what rate should apply and which company will fall under which sector. We are expecting clarity on the definition,” said Rahul Garg, leader, direct tax, PwC.

Manisha Gupta, partner, Deloitte Haskins & Sells, said the safe harbour margins were high. “The government agrees to far lower rates at tribunals and in advance pricing agreements,” she said.

The lowering of safe harbour rates will ease the advance pricing agreement backlog. The government introduced the advance pricing scheme in 2012 and there are over 500 applications pending.

“We are considering sector-wise handling of cases by officers to expedite decisions,” the tax official said. “We have already made a request for an increase in manpower to clear the backlog. We expect a decision soon,” he added.

India has the highest incidence of transfer pricing litigation worldwide. The number of cases scrutinised has quadrupled from 1,061 in 2005-06 to 4,290 in 2014-15.

Among measures recently introduced, the government said an officer would be assigned not more than 50 important and complex transfer pricing cases. Officers typically audit more than 70 cases at a time.

Besides, the tax department has incorporated range and multi-year data in transfer pricing calculations to bring Indian laws in line with international practices. Earlier, single-year data and the arithmetic mean were used to arrive at transfer pricing.

Earlier this year, the finance ministry allowed rollback advance pricing agreements so that multinational companies could settle taxes for previous years as well.

“The burden on tribunals, high courts, Supreme Court and even on the APA team can be substantially reduced if the Indian government revamps the safe harbour rules (that is, devising calibrated and more reasonable margins for the sector consistent with the margins finally arrived at post-tribunal orders/MAP/APA and providing clarifications on what constitutes software development activities, KPO, contract R&D,” said a Deloitte & Taxsutra report on transfer pricing.

Approximately over 40 per cent of APA applications are from the IT/ITeS sector. Up to September 2015, more than 575 APA applications have been filed with the APA authorities. Fourteen of these APAs have been concluded, of which 12 are unilateral and two bilateral (with Japan and the UK).

Source:Business Standard

Relaxed tax residency rules to help MNCs

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While Indian-incorporated firms (Indian companies) are taxed at 30% plus dividend distribution tax (DDT), non-resident (foreign) companies are taxed at 40% on Indian income without DDT.

Foreign companies with Indian shareholders won’t have to pay taxes here for their worldwide income unless they are managed from India on an everyday basis. If these foreign companies are managed from outside India, whether or not they are promoted by resident Indians, they will have to pay taxes in India only for the income they earn in the country.

This major relaxation is being built into the place of effective management (POEM) rules being finalised by the finance ministry, government sources told FE. The POEM concept that was included in the I-T Act early this fiscal had raised fears among many multinational companies with Indian promoters or major shareholders that New Delhi would lay claim to taxes on their incomes attributable to other geographies.

While Indian-incorporated firms (Indian companies) are taxed at 30% plus dividend distribution tax (DDT), non-resident (foreign) companies are taxed at 40% on Indian income without DDT. Although the tax rates on foreign companies are higher, the prospect of subjecting the worldwide income to taxation here could have potentially hit many MNCs with Indian stakeholders.

The proposed lenient POEM rule, analysts said, would give the likes of UK’s Jaguar Land Rover (which has the Indian parent Tata Motors) a chance to convince the Indian tax authorities that the UK firm’s commercial decisions are taken by the local management there and avoid paying taxes for the income in the UK and elsewhere in India.

Similarly, foreign subsidiaries of state-owned oil companies such as ONGC Videsh’s Imperial Energy incorporated in Cyprus and ONGC Nile Ganga doing oil exploration in Sudan, Syria and Venezuela can potentially show that their managerial and commercial decisions are ‘in substance’ made at the local level although OVL, the Indian holding company, is under the direct administrative control of the government of India. The same is true for HPCL’s Singapore subsidiary Prize Petroleum International.

“Putting a management in place is a shareholder decision, not a management decision. Promoters getting into any other role would amount to overstepping shareholder rights, going by the strict interpretation of law. The POEM as a principle must cover only management decisions,” said Rahul Garg, leader, direct tax, PwC India.

According to experts, seeking permission from an Indian parent on a decision taken by an overseas subsidiary to see if it is in line with the global policy of the parent may not ordinarily amount to the parent exercising management control, unlike the parent passing on a centrally taken decision to the foreign associate. However, where the senior management of foreign associates of Indian firms are based in India or have common board members based in India, the overseas entity may find it hard to prove that management decisions are taken from outside India. Also, foreign associates of Indian companies lacking skilled managerial personnel or do not assume business risks on its own, could have a tough time convincing the taxman in India that they are not Indian residents.

Prior to the Finance Act, 2015, a company was considered an Indian resident if its control and management were wholly in India throughout the financial year. Since some Indian companies sought to avoid resident status and taxes on their worldwide income by holding one or two board meetings outside India, the government changed the residence definition saying that any company, the ‘place of effective management’ of which is in India, would also be a resident company. Tax residence is a place from where key management and commercial decisions necessary for running the company are, in substance, made. According to experts, this OECD definition of tax residence relies on the substance of the organisation’s structure than its legal form. The government is bringing out clarifications as there is not much global guidance on the concept.

Points to note:

* Mere shareholder rights with Indians won’t result in resident status
* Only managerial decisions taken here will make foreign firms Indian residents and liable to pay tax for entire global income here
* Foreign firm has to prove management independence to avoid tax residence if board members are common with that of Indian ones.

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/article/economy/relaxed-tax-residency-rules-to-help-mncs/156692/

 

Income Tax dept lowers pitch on tax demands on multinationals

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The income tax department will withdraw from a few hundreds of tax cases with multinational corporations pending in tribunals by the end of this fiscal.

This marks a significant softening of approach given its high-pitched income reassessments for MNCs in recent years, mainly by contesting the pricing of their cross-border transactions.

Sources said the department, which has advance pricing arrangements (APAs) with 16 MNCs and aims to sign 150 such deals on the broad principles for future valuation of inter-country transactions for tax purposes, is willing to extend the conciliatory approach to transactions in the past four years too. Once the mutually agreed principles in an APA are applied to past transactions, the department would not pursue tax demands made earlier.

Wherever the department is the appellant in tribunals, it will withdraw the appeals. The move, part of the government’s efforts to reduce tax litigation and boost investor confidence, is set to benefit several large corporations including technology companies like Microsoft and IBM.

Tax tussles

* I-T department has resolved 45 double taxation disputes so far with the US bilaterally
* India and 16 MNCs have agreed on pricing of cross-border transactions under APA scheme, target 150 for the year
* APAs to allow agreements on pricing of transactions in the past years as well
* On this basis, tax department will withdraw from many disputes pending before tribunals

In the case of related-party cross-border transactions of MNCs alone, alleged tax dues has touched Rs 2.7 lakh crore. Earlier the government had decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court decisions of the Bombay High Court that held companies like Shell and Vodafone were not liable to tax on the alleged undervaluation of certain share transactions among group companies.

So far India has signed 16 APAs in the business of telecommunication, oil exploration, pharmaceuticals, finance, banking and software development and expects another 140 or so to be completed by the end of the fiscal. An APA is an agreement between the tax authority and companies on the principles of valuation of certain transactions, which will exempt the company from rigorous tax audits on cross-border deals.

Many of the tax demands raised on MNCs on cross-border transactions in the last few years have led to disputes. Scores of cases are pending with the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal. The government wants to stop these disputes from escalating to the higher judiciary. The number of cases in which the tax department has received favourable orders from tribunals are not very encouraging.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley has promised that all legacy tax disputes would soon be resolved through administrative or judicial means.

While an APA between a company and the tax department will resolve a dispute in India, the possibility of double taxation would be fully addressed only when the tax authority in the company’s home country too becomes party to such agreement. The US, which is home to many technology firms facing tax disputes in India, has recently started steps to implement such “bilateral APAs”.

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/article/economy/income-tax-dept-lowers-pitch-on-tax-demands-on-multinationals/148358/