Joe Huddleston, executive director of the Multistate Tax Commission, said recently that he hopes to have a concrete proposal for a joint transfer pricing audit program in time for the MTC's December executive committee meeting in New Orleans, according to an article in BBNA's Daily Tax Report by Dolores Gregory.

Huddleston told BBNA that the agency is now looking into the cost of hiring outside auditors and other experts.

“We are trying to determine what our next steps need to be, what our budget concerns need to be in terms of the costs of hiring personnel to do this or training personnel,” he said.

“We are leaning towards hiring new personnel--at least two auditors, an attorney, a consulting economist, and in all likelihood, a disclosure officer,” he said.

If the MTC established a dedicated transfer pricing audit program, Huddleston explained, the agency would be requesting and receiving federal tax information, which involves compliance with federal regulations on confidentiality. That would make a full-time disclosure officer a necessary position, he said.

He declined to speculate about the overall budget of such a program, but said it would not work economically unless at least six states signed on and agreed to support it. There would need to be a multiyear commitment among those states, he said, and only participating states would share the costs.

“To put in place a program as complicated as this one would be, we are looking at 2014 sometime,” he added.

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