Frequently in transfer pricing, taxpayers must look to case law to answer questions not adequately addressed by either the OECD guidelines or the relevant country’s regulations. In the area of related-party guarantees, for example, the decision by Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal in General Electric CapitalCanada Inc. v. The Queen is taking on added importance because of the lack of specific guidance on the subject.

Bloomberg BNA’s Transfer Pricing Forum, which brings together experts from up to 30 countries, meets four times a year to address key transfer pricing concerns or questions, explaining how these issues are handled in their own jurisdiction and offering practical detail and insight. Past topics include the transfer pricing of related-party guarantees, the use of comparable data and the transactional net margin method, tax authorities’ use of transfer pricing rules to extract exit charges after a company restructures, and the treatment of goodwill.

The Transfer Pricing Forum editorial board will form a panel on March 11--Day 1 of the Bloomberg BNA-Baker & McKenzie Global Transfer Pricing Conference--to discuss recent case law developments. Proposed cases for discussion include:

• Serdia/Fulford (transfer pricing in the pharmaceutical industry, the price paid for active ingredients, comparability adjustments)
• Cadence Taiwan (should a taxpayer be held to its contractual documentation, despite evidence that the transfer pricing was not consistent with the arm's-length principle?)
• A Oy (should related-party interest rates reflect the creditworthiness of a subsidiary or the rates charged to the group?)
• Altera Corp. (whether stock options should be included in cost sharing arrangements with foreign affiliates—first challenge to the 2003 U.S. rules specifically requiring cost sharing of options)
• Chiel India (pass-through costs, the principle of value-adding costs, and which costs should not be included in the base when calculating a markup or margin)

Panelists are Danny Beeton, editor in chief of Bloomberg BNA’s Transfer Pricing Forum and head of transfer pricing at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London; Murray Clayson, a tax partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London; Mike Heimert, global transfer pricing managing director at Duff & Phelps in Chicago; Mayra Lucas Mas, Advisor,Tax Treaty, Transfer Pricing & Financial Transactions Division at the OECD’s Center for Tax Policy and Administration in Paris; Rahul Mitra, partner and head of transfer pricing at PricewaterhouseCoopers in New Delhi; and Dirk Van Stappen, partner with KPMG in Antwerp and Belgium and member of the European Union Joint Transfer Pricing Forum.

To register, visit http://www.bna.com/global-transfer-conference.

Molly Moses, Managing Editor, Transfer Pricing Report