Recently, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Tax Inspectors Without Borders (TIWB) Programme in Seychelles. In this initiative, India has bagged a crucial role as the Partner Administration and has contributed a Tax Expert for the programme.
Programme Duration and Goals
The programme is projected to span across a 12-month period. The focus of this partnership is to assist Seychelles in fortifying its tax administration system. This will be executed by transferring technical expertise and skills to Seychelles’ tax auditors. Moreover, the best audit practices will be shared with Seychelles as part of the programme.
Focus on Transfer Pricing Cases
The TIWB programme is designed to pay attention to transfer pricing cases, particularly in the tourism and financial services sectors. Transfer price, or transfer cost, is the term used to describe the price at which transactions happen between related parties, like during the exchange of supplies or labor between departments. Multinational corporations have been known to manipulate these prices to divert profits into regions with lower tax rates.
India’s Role in Previous TIWB Programmes
It is also noteworthy that this is the sixth time India is extending its support to a TIWB programme by offering a Tax Expert. The fifth TIWB programme which had India’s engagement was initiated in Bhutan in June 2021.
About the Tax Inspectors Without Borders Programme
TIWB is fundamentally a capacity-building initiative. It was launched jointly by the OECD and UNDP in July 2015. The purpose of this programme is to boost the auditing capacity of developing countries and to ensure multinational corporations worldwide comply with it.
Qualified professionals are appointed and deployed to developing countries spanning across diverse regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These professionals aid in building tax capacities in audit, criminal tax investigations, and making effective use of automatically exchanged information.
The assistance provided by TIWB has contributed towards escalating domestic resource mobilization in some of the least developed countries globally.
The article draws its information from the official press release by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), Government of India.
