{"id":446,"date":"2016-02-04T15:45:57","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T15:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wtpadvisors.com\/tp-blog\/?p=446"},"modified":"2024-02-12T17:17:57","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T17:17:57","slug":"the-economist-falls-for-formulary-apportionment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wtpadvisors.com\/tp-blog\/the-economist-falls-for-formulary-apportionment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Economist Falls for Formulary Apportionment"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kash Mansori, WTP Advisors
\nPosted: February 04, 2016<\/p>\n

Last week The Economist devoted one of its leaders to the topic of transfer pricing. From the January 30th issue:<\/p>\n

Going after Google<\/a><\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s tax men struck a poor deal. But the real problem lies with flawed corporate-tax rules.<\/p>\n

It was meant to win plaudits for clawing more money out of cunning, tax-shy multinationals. Instead, a deal between Google and the Britsh government, in which the tech giant will pay \u00a3130m ($185m) in back taxes covering a ten-year period, has
\nattracted only opprobrium.<\/p>\n

\u2026Britain may well have been too generous to Google. But the bigger problem with the deal is what it says about international efforts to crack down on corporate-tax avoidance.<\/p>\n

The Economist\u2019s leaders typically highlight major economic and political issues of the day, and transfer pricing and corporate taxation is certainly one of them right now; that\u2019s exactly what\u00a0BEPS<\/a>\u00a0was all about, after all. Unfortunately, in this case the conclusion reached by\u00a0The Economist\u00a0is not helpful:<\/p>\n

The problem is\u2026 \u00a0a damaging fiction which is ingrained in the current system [of corporate taxation]: that a multinational can be seen as a cluster of separate companies to be treated as if they are trading with each other at arm\u2019s length. The \u201ctransfer pricing\u201d rules that police this system are complex and flawed. Keeping this approach, but toughening up the policing, means creating yet more rules \u2014 and loopholes.<\/p>\n

Better to think of each firm as a single entity. Then countries could either agree to share the tax on companies\u2019 worldwide profits according to a formula that takes account of their sales, employees, assets and so on; or allow the entire worldwide profits to be taxed by the home country, with a tax-credit mechanism for countries where the work actually goes on or revenue is earned \u2014 but, crucially, not brass-plate jurisdictions \u2014 in order to avoid double taxation. In both cases, the incentives and opportunities to move profits into tax havens would be greatly reduced.<\/p>\n

This is essentially a call for a move to\u00a0formulary apportionment<\/a>. And The Economist is not alone in calling for such a fundamental change to the international tax landscape: advocates include\u00a0prominent tax policy organizations<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Nobel Prize-winning economists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And to be honest, a part of me wishes that they were right. Much could be said in its favor if one could magically endow the world with a coherent and consistent worldwide formulary apportionment system. But in the absence of such supernatural intervention, trying to switch to a formulary apportionment system would probably be worse than the alternatives.<\/p>\n

An earlier post (“There Must Be Better Way, Right?<\/a>“) provides a fuller description of the reasons formulary apportionment is not as attractive an option in the real world as it is in theory. But in brief:<\/p>\n