Daily Times

Crypto currencies and Blockchains

Digitalisation presents opportunities, as well as challenges to revenue mobilisation for the developed and developing countries. Technologies, like blockchain, are envisaged as secure methods of recordkeeping while simplifying and providing an enabling environment for crypto currencies, which, however, endanger tax transparency and equitable sharing in cross-border revenue streams.

The geographic allocation of taxation claims through amended profit allocation and nexus rules is the rage of the day in the Organisation of Economically Developed Countries (OECD). The international community is analyzing the revenue and consequential tax potential to ensure multinational enterprises (MNEs) face a minimum level of taxation while at the same time each country in which any MNE operates is not deprived of its legitimate and due share of revenue arising from economic activity. The theme arose from digital tax proposals revolving around the allocation of taxing rights, embracing nexus issues such as “non-physical presence nexus rule”, and predictably assigning taxing entitlements to market or user jurisdictions where economic value arises through businesses. Proponents of implementation of a new nexus tenet with necessary modifications to existing tax treaties may be empowered by means of the multilateral instrument (MLI) approach. First-timers to digital resource allocation principles may be familiar to the doctrine of Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) and global anti-base erosion rules. The recent endorsement of the applicability of this doctrine may find comfort in the endorsement at the G20 Finance Ministers forum, held in Japan this year, stressing on the desire to achieve a broad-based understanding acceptable to all stakeholders on revenue stream channelising of digital activities/operations across a swath of countries/jurisdictions.

Market Jurisdiction Approach of MNE’s

Any MNE’s profit can be assigned to market jurisdictions through modified residual profit split method, fractional apportionment method and distribution-based approach. The first approach caters to a situation where a proportion of an MNE’s non-routine profit would be allocated to market jurisdictions, the second where an entity’s profits for sales to market jurisdictions would be allocated to those market jurisdictions under a to-be-determined formula contingent upon certain predetermined factors. The last approach deals with the baseline profit being determined for marketing, distribution and user-related activities in a market jurisdiction, altered to replicate an MNE’s gross profit and viability in return to market jurisdiction.

Size of MNE’s Relevant

The scale and nature of operations of MNE’s, their magnitude in terms of both revenues and operations, regional or international extent of outreach, manner of treatment and apportionment of losses amongst MNE’s and their subsidiaries to disguise or offset the same and finally adoption on universally proposed profit allocation rules and the existing transfer pricing rules to circumvent impending double jeopardy of taxation.

Technically speaking the global anti-base erosion rules

Incorporate inclusion rule, an undertaxed payment rule and a switch over rule. The instrument of tax treaties mandates a state of residence of MNE’s to apply the credit method instead of the exemption method where profits attributable to a permanent establishment or derived from immovable property (which is not part of a permanent establishment) are subjected to tax at an effective tax rate below the minimum rate. Rapidly digitalizing economy countries and jurisdictions involved in the OECD, as well as G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS, will spur initiatives towards reaching a global resolution to the ongoing controversy mired over the most feasible and best international gold standard tax treatment of multinational enterprises.

Eventually, rules and covenants will need to be framed that split up the legitimate right to tax the income of MNE’s enterprises among various jurisdictions, comprising conventional transfer-pricing rules and the arm’s length principle eventually reflecting in the actual profits of MNE’s.

Global Move towards Digital Revenue Regulation

As the impact of exchange of country generated and shared reports bites in from 2018 for the tax year of 2016 in the year 2017 the number of countries that acceded to ML’s was 67 countries with the ensuing mechanism requiring implementation of the treaty contingent steps as evidenced with a revenue windfall of almost 3 billion euros in the EU based albeit on international value-added tax and general sales tax principle. The US treasury authorities have proposed a raise in the global tax rate of US MNE’s on their offshore income above a single digit and the taxpayer MNE’s are re-evaluating their transfer pricing loci in anticipation. Some revenue jurisdictions are formulating interim measure through the imposition of an excise tax on the supply of certain e-services as a first measure. In the developing countries, the stakeholders should urgently convene at a single platform to regulate and tap and at the same time manage the latest cross-border digital trade in electronic services and trade to secure their economic frontiers.

Razeen Ahmed researches finance. The article was reviewed by Nadir Mumtaz