The PCT Partners organized a virtual workshop for the Toolkit for Addressing Difficulties in Accessing Comparables Data for Transfer Pricing Studies on March 16-17, 2020. The workshop was originally scheduled to be held face-to-face with tax administrators and tax policy experts from different countries at the OECD Multilateral Tax Centre in Ankara, Turkey from March 16-20, 2020. However, to minimize the COVID-19 risk, the workshop went virtual.

The workshop was delivered jointly by Transfer Pricing experts from the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF as well as the Ministry of Finance of France. Nearly 70 senior level officials from Tax Administrations and Ministries of Finance across developing countries who deal with transfer pricing issues participated.

Participants were encouraged to discuss practical, real-life transfer pricing cases at the workshop. Following the discussion on case studies, expert instructors helped participants resolve their challenges by providing guidance from the revised Transfer Pricing Guidelines and the toolkit. 

A common concern of developing economies in the implementation of transfer pricing regimes relates to difficulties in accessing information on “comparables”: data on transactions between independent parties used in the application of the arm’s length principle. In response to this challenge and under a mandate from the Development Working Group of the G20, PCT published the Toolkit for Addressing Difficulties in Accessing Comparables Data for Transfer Pricing Analyses in June 2017 to assist tax administrations of developing countries. The toolkit sets out several policy options that developing economies could consider along with some additional initiatives that could be taken on by countries, or international or regional organizations to more systematically mitigate the problems caused by poor availability of or access to relevant data.

More information on the event and the agenda can be found here.