TEI, U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Tax Policy liaison meeting agenda.

• Position: TECHNICAL SUBMISSIONS

On February 26-27, a delegation from Tax Executives Institute met with the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, John Koskinen, and senior officials of the Internal Revenue Service and with the Treasury Department's Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, Mark Mazur, and senior officials of Treasury's Office of Tax Policy. The agendas from the meetings are published here. We will publish the meeting minutes at a later date.

1. Welcome and Introductions

2. 2015 Priorities and Challenges

   We invite a discussion of the Office of Tax Policy's (OTP or Treasury) priorities, as well as the challenges OTP is facing in the current environment of declining budget and staffing resources and increasing workloads.

3. OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project

   1. In General

      The OECD and the Member and Other States participating in the BEPS project have made tremendous progress under the 15 items in the BEPS Action Plan since its publication in 2013. We invite discussion of Treasury's view of the general progress made under the Action Plan, as well as:

      * Prospects for developing consensus views among the participating States on the various items;

      * Consensus within the IRS and Treasury that the United States can and will implement certain of the OECD's proposals administratively;

      * BEPS proposals that the United States is unlikely to implement administratively or otherwise (due to, for example, competitiveness/confidentiality issues or administrative burdens on Treasury and/or U.S. business); and

      * The current expected timetable for administrative implementation in the United States.

      Many countries, including the United States as discussed below, have chosen to move forward ahead of the OECD's final recommendations on many items of the Action Plan (see, e.g., the United Kingdom's diverted profits tax concerning permanent establishments). What impact will these uncoordinated, unilateral actions have for developing consensus as the BEPS project nears completion at the end of this year? How does Treasury anticipate these unilateral actions will impact the likelihood that the major non-OECD Member States participating in the process (notably China and India) will adopt the approach of the OECD if they disagree with some of the final recommendations?

   2. BEPS Action 13--Country-by-Country Reporting

      On February 6, 2015, the OECD released a document addressing implementation of the transfer pricing documentation guidance and country-by-country reporting template finalized in September 2014 under BEPS Action 13. One issue covered by the document, which is of particular interest to TEI members, is how information will be shared with particular jurisdictions and between jurisdictions. The OECD document provides welcome news that countries participating in the BEPS project must agree to the confidentiality and appropriate use of the country-by-country template and that the template should only be shared with jurisdictions that fulfil those conditions.

      Senior IRS officials recently suggested that because of resource constraints the IRS will not be able to utilize the information in the OECD country-by-country reporting template developed under BEPS Action 13 even if compiled and reported to the IRS--going so far as to say that the IRS would have trouble even sharing it with treaty partners. In light of these statements and the resource constraints under which the IRS and Treasury continue to operate, what are the prospects for the government requiring U.S. headquartered multinationals to report this information to the IRS in the near term in accordance with the new guidance from the OECD? While the OECD guidance states that the template should be reported by a multinational...