Pacific Rim Tax Institute's Second Annual Conference.

• Author: Karlinsky, Stewart
• Position: Chapter News ...

On January 19 and 20, 2012, the Pacific Rim Tax Institute--co-sponsored by TEI's Santa Clara Valley Chapter as well as the Silicon Valley Tax Director's Group, Stanford Law School, United States Council for International Business, and the San Francisco Foreign Tax Club--held its second annual conference. The mission of the Pacific Rim Tax Institute and the conference is to provide a venue for Pacific Rim countries' high-level government tax officials (including those from the United States) and the tax officials from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to discuss important current tax issues and share developments with multinational tax officers and practitioners. Thus, its aim is to encourage constructive dialogue and networking between the corporate tax community and tax administrators, and to improve the mutual understanding as well as more effective compliance with the participating countries' tax rules.

In the interest of transparency, the conference invites reporters from TAX NOTES and Bloomberg's BNA DAILY TAX REPORT. Several articles were published regarding the conference, chief of which was the announcement by Sam Maruca, IRS LB&I Director of Transfer Pricing Operations, that the IRS will withdraw the 2007 Coordinated Issue Paper (CIP) regarding cost sharing buy-ins arrangement, as well as discussions about the government's new Advanced Pricing Agreement (APA) and Mutual Agreement group melding within the IRS LB&I International Division from the Chief Counsel's Office.

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This year's conference began with an interesting presentation by Paul Saffo, a professor at Stanford University, on Capitalism vs. Industrial Policy to frame discussions of differing goals of developed and developing Pacific Rim countries. Pam Olson, U.S. Deputy Tax Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers and former Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, made a presentation on International Tax Reform, and Mike Mundaca, co-leader of Ernst & Young's National Tax Department and another former Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, discussed Domestic Corporate Tax Reform, including suggesting that the United States should consider adopting a...