Business is dissatisfied with the transfer pricing adjustment – Kommersant

At the Tax Forum of the RSPP, changes adopted last year in terms of transfer pricing (transfer pricing, price control in foreign trade transactions between related parties) were also discussed. Starting this year, the list of persons recognized as interdependent has been expanded; when non-market prices are used, the difference with the market price is recognized as the payment of dividends and is taxed at 15%; penalties for price discrepancies have also been increased from 40% to 100% of the amount of underpaid taxes. Business, noted the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Shokhin, considers all this a “hidden increase in the tax burden”; the bill, according to him, amounts to hundreds of billions of rubles in additional withdrawals.

The Federal Tax Service does not share these concerns. Deputy head of the service Yulia Shepeleva assured that 80-90% of all transactions are “in a safe price range” and for them “virtually nothing has changed.” However, as follows from the words of Natalia Kozlova, partner of the Trust Technologies company, now, due to the inaccessibility of foreign databases, it has become more difficult to calculate “hitting the interval”. Problems may also arise when independently adjusting the transaction amount for tax purposes – in order to avoid a fine (a business is exempt from liability if a foreign counterparty returns to the Russian Federation the difference between the applied and market prices). In the current conditions, this requirement is difficult to meet, and Russian companies may receive a fine, and therefore it was proposed to allow the return of funds to be replaced by a real settlement of claims with the counterparty. The Federal Tax Service is ready to “speak out” about this, but warned that such offsets will be “deeply examined” by the tax service.

Evgenia Kryuchkova