The Role of Pricing in Taxation of Business Enterprises

Abstract

The problem of pricing is elaborated with respect to setting the tax base for calculating tax obligations (taxes and duties) assessed and paid by business enterprises by the general tax system. The role of the regular market price when calculating the tax base for national taxes (profit tax, value added tax, excise tax and tax on incomes of physical persons) is highlighted. It is shown that valuation of assets (property rights) is the process of estimating their cost on the date of valuation by the established procedure. The valuation can be performed by entities charged with valuation (legal entities, physical persons – entrepreneurs, state power bodies or local power bodies). Subject to valuation are assets (movable and immovable) and property rights (e. g. intellectual property rights, rights for use of nature resources etc.). The cases of obligatory expert valuation of assets are clarified in the course of the study; the valuation phases are substantiated in conformity to the national standards on valuation of assets and property rights. The notion of transfer pricing, occurring in time of transactions involving residents and non-residents that are subject to control by tax bodies in order to combat minimization of income tax, is defined. Economic transactions with a non-resident counterparty are identified as controlled ones by a payer of profit tax, when their result has no effect for a taxation object. An economic transaction will be identified as a controlled one, when it complies with two criteria set by the Tax Code of Ukraine: cost criterion (the volume of annual income and the volume of transactions with a counterparty) and status criterion (what is non-resident, whether or not it is related with a Ukrainian tax payer, where it is registered, what is its organizational and legal form, whether or not it pays profit tax and by what rate). The controlled transactions are subject to audit for the compliance of their prices with “arm’s length” principles, with the possibility of adjusting a transaction price for purposes of profit taxation in case of noncompliance. International and national law establishes five main methods for price determination in the controlled transactions. The choice of method and texted party depends on the essence of transaction and the character of its parties’ interactions. The article gives a description of methods for calculating transfer prices used by tax bodies for auditing the correctness of estimated profit tax in the controlled transactions. The authors believe that the top one is the method of comparative non-controlled price, because it can be used when performing transactions on sales of goods with mass-scale demand, for which it is easier to find the data on analogous transactions of other companies on the commodity market and compare the conditions of such economic transactions.

Keywords

• pricing, transfer pricing, transfer prices, tax obligations, controlled transactions, profit tax, regular price, market prices