International

  • April 16, 2024

    Treasury Gains £12B Fiscal Headroom In New Tax Year

    HM Treasury may have an extra £12 billion ($14.9 billion) to spend this financial year started April 6 thanks to the government's fiscal rule to cut national debt by 2029, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said in a report Tuesday.

  • April 16, 2024

    Taylor Wessing Launches Ireland Tax Practice With New Hire

    Taylor Wessing LLP has recruited its first tax partner in Ireland from Simmons & Simmons LLP to launch a new tax group in the country, continuing its expansion after initially setting up shop in Dublin three years ago.

  • April 16, 2024

    EU Leaders Expected To Clash Over Corp. Tax Harmonization

    European Union leaders are expected to clash at their summit Wednesday and Thursday over whether national corporate taxes should be harmonized to promote equity investments, an official from the bloc said Tuesday.

  • April 15, 2024

    Exxon Seeks $1.8B Tax Refund As Qatar Deal Trial Opens

    Exxon Mobil Corp. argued Monday in Texas federal court that its deal with Qatar to extract natural gas from the country's coast was a partnership, rather than a lease agreement, saying at the start of a trial that it's entitled to get $1.8 billion in tax benefits back from the IRS.

  • April 15, 2024

    House OKs Ending Exemption For Terrorist-Supporting Orgs

    The House passed legislation Monday that would authorize the Internal Revenue Service to suspend the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit organization found by the U.S. Treasury secretary to support foreign terrorism.

  • April 15, 2024

    8th Circ. Urged To Revive IRS' Pricing For Medtronic

    The U.S. government urged the Eighth Circuit on Monday to side with the IRS' method for pricing the intangible property that medical device maker Medtronic licensed to a Puerto Rican affiliate, arguing it's the only way to determine arm's-length royalty rates.

  • April 15, 2024

    EU Seeking Input On Tax Cooperation Program's Progress

    The European Commission is looking for input from the tax administrations of the European Union and cooperating countries on the efficacy of a program meant to aid in the fight against tax fraud, tax evasion and aggressive tax planning, it said Monday.

  • April 15, 2024

    Accounting Ethics Board Issues Int'l Tax Planning Standards

    A global accounting ethics board issued Monday what it says is the first comprehensive suite of global standards on ethical considerations in tax planning and related services in hopes of restoring public trust in accounting firms and corporations.

  • April 15, 2024

    HMRC Maintaining VAT Policies After EU Law Decoupling

    The interpretation of the U.K.'s value-added tax and excise tax regimes have remained the same despite the removal of the supremacy of the European Union's laws at the beginning of the year, HM Revenue & Customs said Monday.

  • April 15, 2024

    More EU Cooperation Needed Against VAT Fraud, Official Says

    The €11 billion ($11.7 billion) in value-added tax fraud uncovered in 2023 by the European Union's prosecution office is probably "only the tip of an iceberg" and should prompt countries to intensify joint cooperation, the office's top official said.

  • April 12, 2024

    FedEx Not Entitled To $84.6M In Tax Credit Dispute, US Says

    FedEx is not entitled to a judgment of nearly $84.6 million that the company requested in March for its foreign tax credit dispute, the federal government said Friday in a Tennessee federal court filing.

  • April 12, 2024

    Adviser Urges ECJ To Toss Ad Co.'s State Aid Appeal

    An outdoor furniture and advertising company shouldn't be allowed to challenge a finding from the European Union's General Court that it should have paid rent and taxes for ads in Brussels that stayed up after its contract with the city ended, an adviser to the bloc's highest court has said.

  • April 12, 2024

    4 Takeaways From Tax Court Nix Of Easement Perpetuity Rule

    The U.S. Tax Court's scrapping of an IRS rule on the perpetuity requirements for conservation easements could draw yet more judicial scrutiny to the agency's rulemaking and shift the focus of easement disputes to how the transactions are valued. Here, Law360 examines four key takeaways from the decision.

  • April 12, 2024

    Australia Issues Outsourced IT Tax Credit Guidance

    The Australian Taxation Office provided guidance for how those making reduced input tax credit claims for complex information technology outsourcing agreements can adequately support such claims.

  • April 12, 2024

    Panama Papers Attys Deny Money Laundering At Trial

    Two attorneys who ran the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama, at the center of a 2016 leak that produced multiple convictions for tax evasion, pled not guilty with 27 others to money-laundering charges as a trial began in Panama, according to prosecutors.

  • April 12, 2024

    OECD Base Erosion Project Still Percolating, Think Tank Says

    Policymakers should recognize that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's tax project from roughly a decade ago to reduce base erosion and profit shifting may still be affecting companies' behavior, according to a publication released Friday from the fiscally conservative-leaning Tax Foundation.

  • April 12, 2024

    Final 'Look-Through' Rules Coming Soon, IRS Official Says

    The IRS is about to release final regulations that would, in a manner of speaking, look through the corporate owners of real estate investment entities to determine whether they are domestically controlled, an agency official said Friday.

  • April 12, 2024

    Co. Suspected Of Laundering AU$1B To Enable Tax Fraud

    Australian authorities seized AU$500,000 ($323,000) from an operation in Sydney suspected of laundering over AU$1 billion to facilitate tax fraud schemes, the authorities announced.

  • April 12, 2024

    4 Arrested In France In €60M VAT Fraud Probe

    European Union prosecutors arrested four people in western France suspected of a €60 million ($63.6 million) value-added fraud scheme involving the transfer of goods and money between several countries inside and outside the bloc, the European Public Prosecutor's Office said Friday.

  • April 12, 2024

    Denmark's £1.4B Tax Fraud Trial Heads For 'Uncharted Waters'

    Denmark will open its £1.4 billion ($1.7 billion) dividend fraud case in London on Monday, beginning a yearlong trial that will have wide implications for other disputes arising out of the cum-ex trading scandal that has swept Europe.

  • April 12, 2024

    Taxation With Representation: Freshfields, Kirkland & Ellis

    In this week's Taxation with Representation, eBay acquires Collectors' Goldin auction house, Vertex Pharmaceuticals buys Alpine Immune Sciences, Vista Equity Partners purchases Model N and Tradeweb Markets buys Institutional Cash Distributors.

  • April 12, 2024

    Countries Late On Pillar 2 Need To Catch Up, EU Official Says

    Countries within the European Union that are late implementing the global minimum tax rules need to do so soon, an official with the European Commission said Friday, adding that countries failing to do so could face fines.

  • April 11, 2024

    BlackRock Can't Deduct Interest On $4B, London Court Finds

    Financial services firm BlackRock cannot deduct interest on $4 billion in loans it used for the 2009 purchase of Barclays Global Investors because avoiding taxes was the main reason for the way it structured the transaction, a London appeals court ruled Thursday.

  • April 11, 2024

    France's Anti-Money Laundering Reports Up 15% In 2023

    France's anti-money laundering unit received 15% more reports of suspicious financial transactions in 2023 compared with 2022, continuing a trend that has resulted in a seven-fold increase in such reports over the past decade, the country's finance ministry said Thursday.

  • April 11, 2024

    Int'l Salesman Stuck With FBAR Fines For Swiss Account

    An agricultural salesman earning money in Ukraine willfully hid a Swiss bank account from the IRS that neither his accountant nor his wife knew about, a Nebraska federal judge said Thursday in upholding more than $600,000 in reporting penalties against him.

Expert Analysis

  • What Tax-Exempt Orgs. Need From Energy Credit Guidance

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    Guidance clarifying the Inflation Reduction Act’s credit regime, expected from the U.S. Department of the Treasury this summer, should help tax-exempt organizations determine the benefits of clean energy projects and integrate alternative energy investments into their activities, say attorneys at Morgan Lewis.

  • How Foreign Info Return Penalty Case May Benefit Taxpayers

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    The U.S. Tax Court's recent decision that the Internal Revenue Service cannot penalize taxpayers for failing to file foreign corporation information returns may give similarly situated taxpayers an opportunity to also avoid penalties, provided they protect their rights before the decision is overturned or mooted by legislation, say attorneys at Arnold & Porter.

  • The Nuts And Bolts Of IRS Domestic Content Tax Credit

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    Recent IRS guidance provides specifics on how renewable energy projects can qualify for bonus tax credits by meeting U.S. domestic content rules, but also creates a qualification framework that will be complicated for project developers to navigate, say Scott Cockerham and Wolfram Pohl at Orrick.

  • Taxing The Digital Economy: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

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    U.S. tech companies should watch for important developments in international taxation, including the resolution of Apple's decade-old state aid case, growing frustration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's global tax plan and adoption of the digital services tax instead, says Joyce Beebe at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

  • Big Tax Changes For Multinational Cos. In Budget Proposal

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    The Biden administration’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposes changes that would materially alter decades-old Internal Revenue Code provisions, requiring a shift in multinational corporations' tax planning strategies comparable to that required after enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, say Xenia Garofalo and Kyle Colonna at Eversheds Sutherland.

  • Senate Credit Suisse Report Puts Attention On Banks, Trusts

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    The Senate Finance Committee's recent finding that Credit Suisse violated a plea agreement struck over its role in enabling offshore tax evasion has important ramifications for banks and trusts, including how they onboard, document and report on transactions relevant to U.S. reporting requirements, say Will Barry and Ian Herbert at Miller & Chevalier.

  • Seeking IRS Accountability For Faulty Microcaptive Notice

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    Like the taxpayers in Standard Insurances v. U.S. seeking to expand earlier wins in microcaptive insurance cases that limit IRS use of improperly obtained information, others should consider ways to hold the agency accountable and provide incentive for it to follow the law going forward, says Joshua Smeltzer at Gray Reed.

  • Biden Admin. Proposals Both Encourage And Thwart EV Adoption

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    While the Biden administration has been aggressively focused on promoting electric vehicles from the start, its recently issued guidance on EV tax credits and its restrictive new auto emissions proposal create a sense of implementation whiplash that may frustrate manufacturers and consumers, says Levi McAllister at Morgan Lewis.

  • The Key Issues Keeping Transfer Pricing A Top Tax Concern

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    Several challenges preventing a global economic reemergence from the pandemic era are making practitioners reevaluate commonly used transfer pricing models, and embrace new technologies and ways of doing business, say Farnaz Amini and Sophia Castro Jurado at Marcum.

  • Curtailing Offshore Tax-Advantaged Investment In China

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    The U.S. government's plans to establish a new outbound investment regime hold the potential to arrest Chinese companies' increasing use of offshore, tax-advantaged locations to raise capital, says David Plotinsky at Morgan Lewis.

  • Cos. May Want To Wait Out US-EU Green Incentives Fight

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    As the European Union considers measures to compete with the Inflation Reduction Act's incentives for U.S. production of clean tech, and EU and U.S. officials discuss a possible compromise, companies in the green sector should consider taking a wait-and-see approach to investment decisions, says Todd Thacker at Goldberg Segalla.

  • India's Budget Proposals May Ease Entry For Certain Sectors

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    India’s recently released budget includes proposals to facilitate doing business in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City and moderate thousands of compliance requirements, opening up new opportunities for foreign businesses in the digital infrastructure, manufacturing and renewable energy sectors, say Mukesh Butani and Seema Kejriwal at BMR Legal.

  • High Court Ax Of Atty-Client Privilege Case Deepens Split

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    The U.S. Supreme Court's recent dismissal of In re: Grand Jury as improvidently granted maintains a three-way circuit split on the application of attorney-client privilege to multipurpose communications, although the justices have at least shown a desire to address it, say Trey Bourn and Thomas DiStanislao at Butler Snow.

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