The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has singed 20 unilateral advance pricing agreements (APAs) with Indian taxpayers as it looks to reduce litigation by providing certainty in transfer pricing.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has singed 20 unilateral advance pricing agreements (APAs) with Indian taxpayers as it looks to reduce litigation by providing certainty in transfer pricing.
“CBDT entered into 20 unilateral advance pricing agreements… (on) August 29, 2016 and August 30, 2016, with Indian taxpayers. Many of these agreements also have a ‘Rollback’ provision in them,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

“Further, the taxpayer has the option to rollback the APA for four preceding years,” it added.

The APA scheme was introduced in the Income-tax Act 2012, and the rollback provisions were introduced in 2014.

According to the statement, the 20 APAs signed pertain to sectors like, Information Technology, Banking & Finance, Insurance, Human Resources, Pharmaceutical, Solar Energy, Oil & Gas, Foods & Beverages, Telecommunications and NGO.

Noting that with these signings, the total number of APAs entered into by the CBDT has reached 98, which includes 4 bilateral APAs and 94 unilateral APAs, the statement said the CBDT expects more APAs to be concluded and signed in the near future.

“A total of 33 unilateral APAs and 1 bilateral APA have already been concluded in five months of the current Financial Year as against 55 in FY 2015-16,” it added.

Stressing that the progress of the APA scheme strengthens the government’s commitment to foster a non-adversarial tax regime, the statement said that since its inception, the APA scheme has attracted tremendous interest among Multi National Enterprises (MNEs) and that has resulted in more than 700 applications (both unilateral and bilateral) having been filed in just four years.

The scheme endeavours to provide certainty to taxpayers in the domain of transfer pricing by specifying the methods of pricing and determining the arm’s length price of international transactions in advance for the maximum of five future years.