Towards A Neutral Formulary Apportionment System In Regional Integration

International tax regimes and practices are heavily criticized for failing to fairly levy corporate tax on giant multinational taxpayers in the current globalized and digitalized world. This important and far-seeing book demonstrates how formulary apportionment (FA) – an approach by which a multinational corporation pays each jurisdiction’s corporate tax based on the share of its worldwide income allocated to that jurisdiction – can achieve the much-sought goal of aligning value creation and taxation. The author, through an intensive analysis of the European Union’s (EU’s) Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) Directive Proposal(s) and comparison to the United States (US’s) formulary apportionment experience, shows how the perceived problems with an FA system can be overcome and lays out the necessary elements for its feasibility. With detailed attention to the debates around formulary apportionment and its theoretical foundations, the book provides a blueprint for rebuilding the normative framework for the EU’s tax reform by clearly analysing the implications of the following and more: theorising public benefits to be represented by taxation; reorganising different economic theories about tax neutrality and tax justice; advancing the comparative legal research methodology to analyse law reform by combining the functional approach and the problem-solving approach; designing the logical formulary apportionment system for digital economy; ensuring the removal of the incentive for multinationals to shift reported income to low-tax locations; reducing the tax system’s complexity and the administrative burden it imposes on firms; eliminating transfer pricing complexity for intra-firm transactions; achieving equal weighting of the sales factor, the labour factor, and the asset factor in the formula; application of ‘destination-based’ rule for attributing the sales factor; and replacing the traditional permanent establishment nexus with a ‘factor presence nexus’. The presentation incorporates extensive comparison between the EU’s formulary apportionment tax reform option and FA systems existing in the United States (US) at state level, including reference to relevant US case law and legislation. As a possible option to address the problem of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), formulary apportionment is gaining increasing acceptance and attention. This book will prove invaluable to taxation authorities, tax practitioners, and scholars in its deeply informed and systematic guidance on good practices and prevention of problematic experiences in establishing and implementing an effective and market-neutral FA system.

The traditional international tax regime faces challenges in the digital economy and is criticised for not fairly allocating taxing rights over the profits of multinational enterprises (MNEs)' cross- border economic activities. Allocating taxing rights based on value creation is an urgent reform imperative. OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project in 2015 is a reform effort to address this problem.Since 2021, OECD's Pillar One has established the “new” taxing rights of the market jurisdiction. OECD's Pillar One uses a formula approach to decide the profit allocation. Such development shows that “formulary apportionment” (FA) could be a feasible option for tax reform. However, the core question remains: How should a fair FA be designed to allocate taxing rights? The article especially discusses the FA system in the European Union (EU). The full text is at https://pure.eur.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/83033157/Towards_a_neutral_formulary_apportionment.pdf.

The hurdles emerging from the parallel exercise of Member States’ tax sovereignty have been examined by the CJEU and intensely discussed by scholars. By uncovering a paradox in the CJEU’s case law, this groundbreaking book provides a constructive alternative to the deadlock created by the CJEU when ruling that international juridical double taxation, although constituting an obstacle to free movement, is not contrary to EU law. The book – the first in-depth treatment of this perspective – enables taxpayers facing international juridical double taxation to understand how their ability to pay is protected under EU law and the limitations that protection faces. Every aspect of the matter is rigorously examined, including the following: important differences between the traditional notion of double taxation and the current definition under Council Directive 2017/1852; legal means and methods designed to eliminate international juridical double taxation and the policies underlying them; freedoms of movement as prohibitions that limit the exercise of Member States’ taxing powers; consideration of expenses related to economic activity and personal and family circumstances; and in-depth discussion of taxation of income derived from source versus residence Member State. Throughout the book, the author refers to the case law of the CJEU on both international juridical double taxation and taxpayers’ ability to pay, as well as the relevant academic literature, allowing the reader to understand the current state of EU law on these matters and their relation. The author’s remarkable venture into this challenging field, with a deeply informed construction of instrumental categories and critical review of their content, culminates with a viable reformulation of the serious and growing problem of international juridical double taxation. The book will be welcomed by taxation professionals in practice, policymakers, and academia.

To some extent, because of his overlapping careers in academia and politics, the renowned tax scholar Peter Essers is known for his influential insight that ‘the effects of taxation on the political balance of power, and vice versa, are always interlinked with other phenomena, such as wars, crises, religious developments and inequalities in society’. In this widely ranging festschrift, thirty-six prominent tax scholars from all across Europe examine the legacy of Peter Essers’ research interests, from the larger philosophical, political, and social factors driving tax history to the reality of the taxing State as experienced by taxpayers and tax officials. The book’s outstanding overview of the most relevant technical and policy aspects of European and international taxation includes deeply thoughtful chapters on such topics and issues as the following: developing sustainable corporate tax governance; tax whistleblowing; transfer pricing; balancing qualitative and quantitative approaches to tax research; necessity to reach something close to ‘equal treatment’ between the upper and lower social classes; consent and democracy; tax rebellions; tax evasion and tax avoidance; taxation of cross-border remote workers and their employers; mitigation of double taxation of income earned by entertainers and sportspersons; and the international tax treaty network. More than a homage to this scholar’s far-reaching contributions, this book is remarkable for the variety and academic rigour of the chapters. The understanding its authors provide of both the broad contours and the intricacies of European and international taxation will be of inestimable value to tax practitioners, policymakers, tax consultants, and academics, as well as interested researchers in economics, political science, and sociology.

The Allocation of Multinational Business Income: Reassessing the Formulary Apportionment Option Edited by Richard Krever & François Vaillancourt Although arm’s length methodology continues to prevail in international taxation policy, it has long been replaced by the formulary apportionment method at the subnational level in a few federal countries. Its use is planned for international profit allocation as an element of the European Union’s CCCTB proposals. In this timely book – a global guide to formulary apportionment, both as it exists in practice and how it might function internationally – a knowledgeable group of contributors from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, address this actively debated topic, both in respect of its technical aspects and its promise as a global response to the avoidance, distortions, and unfairness of current allocation systems. Drawing on a wealth of literature considering formulary apportionment in the international sphere and considering decades of experience with the system in the states and provinces of the United States and Canada, the contributors explicate and examine such pertinent issues as the following: the debate about what factors should be used to allocate profits under a formulary apportionment system and experience in jurisdictions using formulary apportionment; application of formulary apportionment in specific sectors such as digital enterprises and the banking industry; the political economy of establishing and maintaining a successful formulary apportionment regime; formulary apportionment proposals for Europe; the role of traditional tax criteria such as economic efficiency, fairness, ease of administration, and robustness to avoidance and incentive compatibility; determining which parts of a multinational group are included in a formulary apportionment unit; and whether innovative profit-split methodologies such as those developed by China are shifting traditional arm’s length methods to a quasi-formulary apportionment system. Providing a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the formulary apportionment option, this state of the art summary of history, current practice, proposals and prospects in the ongoing debate over arm’s length versus formulary apportionment methodologies will be welcomed by practitioners, policy-makers, and academics concerned with international taxation, all of whom will gain an understanding of the case put forward by proponents for adoption of formulary apportionment in Europe and globally and the counter-arguments they face. Readers will acquire a better understanding of the implications of formulary apportionment and its central role in the current debate about the future of international taxation rules. “...providing (sic) all the intellectual ammunition needed to carefully re-examine one of the ideas traditionally considered as apocryphal by the OECD and to a significant portion of the tax professional community...readers of this book will come away not only with a renewed understanding of the multiple facets of formulary apportionment, but also of some of the fundamental pressure points in the international tax system. Accordingly, it is a welcome and timely addition to the literature. ” Dr. Stjepan Gadžo, Assistant Professor at University of Rijeka, Faculty of Law / British Tax Review 2021, Issue 2, p243-246

Schemes of residual profit allocation (RPA) tax multinationals by allocating their ‘routine’ profits to countries in which their activities take place and sharing their remaining ‘residual’ profit across countries on some formulaic basis. They have recently and rapidly come to prominence in policy discussions, yet almost nothing is known about their impact on revenue, investment and efficiency. This paper explores these issues, conceptually and empirically. It finds residual profits to be substantial, but concentrated in a relatively few MNEs, headquartered in few countries. The impact on tax revenue of reallocating excess profits under RPA, while adverse for investment hubs, appears beneficial for lower income countries even when the formula allocates by destination-based sales. The impact on investment incentives is ambiguous and specific both to countries and MNE groups; only if the rate of tax on routine profits is low does aggregate efficiency seem likely to increase.

The international tax system is in dire need of reform. It allows multinational companies to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions and thus reduce their global effective tax rates. A major international project, launched in 2013, aimed to fix the system, but failed to seriously analyse the fundamental aims and rationales for the taxation of multinationals' profit, and in particular where profit should be taxed. As this project nears its completion, it is becomingincreasingly clear that the fundamental structural weaknesses in the system will remain. This book, produced by a group of economists and lawyers, adopts a different approach and starts from first principles in order to generate an international tax system fit for the 21st century. This approach examines fundamental issues of principle and practice in the taxation of business profit and the allocation of taxing rights over such profit amongst countries, paying attention to the interests and circumstances of advanced and developing countries. Once this conceptual framework is developed, the book evaluates the existing system and potential reform options against it. A number of reform options are considered, ranging from those requiring marginal change to radically different systems. Some options have been discussed widely. Others, particularly Residual Profit Split systems and a Destination Based Cash-Flow Tax, are more innovative and have been developed at some length and in depth for the first time in this book. Their common feature is that they assign taxing rights partly/fully to the location of relatively immobile factors: shareholders or consumers.