1994 Final Transfer Pricing Regulations of the United States
本文讨论了美国政府关于转让定价实践的主要研究发现、一系列新法规、1994年最终法规的重要条款，以及美国跨国公司海外关联企业转让定价实践的调查结果，对研究跨国税收的学者有参考价值。
Recent studies of the U.S. government found that foreign-based companies underpaid taxes on the profits of their U.S. affiliates by inflating the prices for goods and services they pay to their foreign parents. The U.S. government introduce a series of new regulations in recent years to eliminate some abuses arising from arbitrary transfer pricing. In this paper, we discuss major findings of government studies on transfer pricing practices, a number of new transfer pricing regulations, important provisions of 1994 final regulations, and survey results on transfer pricing practices of U.S.-based multinational companies with foreign affiliates. INTRODUCTION is rare that the president of the United States, the Congress, the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, ABC News, and all of the Courts agree on something. However, they have all stated recently that transfer pricing is the corporate tax issue of the 1990s and beyond. When you combine this common perception of pricing with new economic developments around the world, transfer pricing may also be one of the most significant political issues of the 1990s and beyond (Ernst & Young 1994, p.v.). An increased autonomy at the divisional levels of many U.S. businesses in the 1960s and the 1970s created the need for a sound transfer pricing system to assure the optimal allocation of corporate resources and to provide meaningful measures of divisional profit performance. This need for an efficient transfer pricing system remained strong in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The focus of transfer pricing has now shifted from domestic to international tax issues. Many developments have made international transfer pricing issues under Section 482 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code more salient for multinational companies. This is true not only for U.S.-based multinational companies, but also for foreign-based multinational companies with U.S. affiliates. It is hard to grasp how the global economy has changed since 1990. One era ended. Another era began. In other words, the Cold War has given way to a new set of relationships: the Soviet Union does not exist any more. Germany is reunited. Eastern European countries can chart their own course. A war took place in the Persian Gulf with vast loss of life and physical damage. The American economy has expanded. The Japanese economy has gone into recession. The trade dispute between the United States and Japan has continued. Regional trading blocs, such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement have been formed and the GATT accord ended seven years of negotiations. Today the world economy faces these and other challenges. Nevertheless, changes from national economic systems to a global economic system present opportunities of shifting the world's energies toward effective management of economic growth. Multinational companies are expected to play a key role in this transformational process because they have the know-how, money and experience. The trend toward a global economy will undoubtedly remove market imperfections that restrict the international flows of goods, services, and capita. These developments reflect an increasing importance of international transfer pricing. Empirical researchers have singled out tax minimization to be one of the most important variables affecting international transfer pricing decisions of multinational companies (Arpan 1972; Burns 1980). This focus is not surprising because transfers between related business units account for approximately two-thirds of U.S. foreign import. The economic benefits are obvious and immediate if transfer prices become the instrument for shifting profits from a country with a higher tax rate to a country with a lower tax rate. However, a company's evaluation of this avenue toward maximized profits must be balanced by the assurance that its practices are consistent with regulations of taxing agencies. …