The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a public consultation paper on 6 February 2020 to receive views and comments on the review of Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCr) under Action 13 of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project.
Galíndez, Medrano & Asociados, in response to this call, submitted our comments, which is why we were invited by the OECD to participate in the Public Consultation meeting on 12-13 May 2020. This meeting focused on various aspects of the report, such as its global implementation, scope and content.
Regarding the threshold of income that determines the reporting obligation, discussions are being held on the possibility of lowering it, the use of information from various periods to determine whether a taxpayer is within the scope, the types of income to be covered by the report and the methodology to be used to update the exchange rate from euro to local currency.
On the reporting obligation, a possible extension is discussed to cover companies that meet the revenue threshold but operate internationally through a permanent establishment and companies under common control that together have consolidated revenues above the minimum threshold.
Regarding the content of the report, the main points under discussion are on table 1 which contains information on the overview of the distribution of profits, taxes and economic activities by jurisdiction. Among them:
- The possibility of reporting by entity, rather than by jurisdiction.
- The possibility to present figures on a consolidated rather than aggregated basis
- The possibility to aggregate columns
- the way in which information is categorised and reported for entities that are not tax resident in any jurisdiction
- the incorporation of tax identification numbers and industry classification codes
CONCLUSIONS
The country-by-country reporting obligation started from the 2018 tax period in the case of Panama. This report was submitted on the Information Exchange Portal of the Directorate General of Revenue at the beginning of the current year by those multinational groups with ultimate parent company resident in Panama with revenues exceeding EUR 750 million at the January 2015 exchange rate. Additionally, entities belonging to a multinational group that are resident for tax purposes in Panama notified the identity and tax residence of the reporting entity of the group.
In this regard, we consider it important to inform our clients and the tax community that the possible modifications to the scope and content of the report that are currently being discussed within the Inclusive Framework of the OECD's BEPS project could lead to changes in the local legal framework for compliance with the minimum standards that would expand the universe of taxpayers subject to these obligations. We therefore recommend a timely review of the structures of multinational groups subject to this obligation and for multinational groups that are not yet within the scope of country-by-country reporting, we suggest studying the impact of compliance costs and the tax risk of implementing new standards.
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