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Transfer pricing is the setting of the price for goods and services sold between controlled (or related) legal entities within an enterprise. For example, if a subsidiary company sells goods to a parent company, the cost of those goods paid by the parent to the subsidiary is the transfer price. Legal entities considered under the control of a single corporation include branches and companies that are wholly or majority owned ultimately by the parent corporation. Certain jurisdictions consider entities to be under common control if they share family members on their boards of directors. Transfer pricing can be used as a profit allocation method to attribute a multinational corporation's net profit (or loss) before tax to countries where it does business. Transfer pricing results in the setting of prices among divisions within an enterprise. In principle, a transfer price should match either what the seller would charge an independent, arm's length customer, or what the buyer would pay an independent, arm's length supplier. While unrealistic transfer prices do not affect the overall enterprise directly, they become a concern for government taxing authorities when transfer pricing is used to lower profits in a division of an enterprise located in a country that levies high income taxes and raise profits in a country that is a tax haven that levies no (or low) income taxes. Transfer pricing is the major tool for corporate tax avoidance〔Michel Aujean (chair) (2001): Company Taxation in the Internal Market; Commission of the EC, 23 Oct 2001〕 also referred to as Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS). ==Profit allocation== The term "transfer pricing" covers the setting, analysis, documentation, and adjustment of charges made between related parties for goods, services, or use of property (including intangible property) via separate accounting for each related party. Transfer prices among divisions of an enterprise should reflect allocation of resources among such components. The transfer prices are supposed to be set at arm's length prices − similar to charges between unrelated parties. Setting transfer prices enables multinational corporations to attribute net profit (or loss) before tax among the countries where they do business. An alternative approach is formulary apportionment, where corporate profits are allocated according to the metrics of activity in the countries. According to the ''amicus curiae'' brief, filed by the attorney generals of Alaska, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon in support of the state of California in the U.S. Supreme Court case of ''Barclays Bank PLC v. Franchise Tax Board,'' the formulary apportionment method, which is also known as the unitary apportionment method, has at least three major advantages over the separate accounting system when applied to multi-jurisdictional businesses. First, the unitary method captures the added wealth and value resulting from economic interdependencies of multistate and multinational corporations through their functional integration, centralization of management, and economies of scale. A unitary business also benefits from more intangible values shared among its constituent parts, such as reputation, good will, customers and other business relationships. See, e.g., Mobil, 445 U.S. at 438-40; Container, 463 U.S. at 164-65. Separate accounting, with its emphasis on carving out of the overall business only income from sources within a single state, ignores the value attributable to the integrated nature of the business. Yet, to a large degree, the wealth, power, and profits of the world's large multinational enterprises are attributable to the very fact that they are integrated, unitary businesses. Hellerstein Treatise, P8.03 at 8-32.n9 As one commentator has explained: To believe that multinational corporations do not maintain an advantage over independent corporations operating within a similar business sphere is to ignore the economic and political strength of the multinational giants. By attempting to treat those businesses which are in fact unitary as independent entities, separate accounting "operates in a universe of pretense; as in Alice in Wonderland, it turns reality into fancy and then pretends it is the real world" Because countries impose different corporate tax rates, a corporation that has a goal of minimizing the overall taxes to be paid will set transfer prices to allocate more of the worldwide profit to lower tax countries. Many countries attempt to impose penalties on corporations if the countries consider that they are being deprived of taxes on otherwise taxable profit. However, since the participating countries are sovereign entities, obtaining data and initiating meaningful actions to limit tax avoidance is hard.〔Ronen Palan (2010): The Offshore World: Sovereign markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires; Cornell University Press, 2006.〕 A publication of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states, "Transfer prices are significant for both taxpayers and tax administrations because they determine in large part the income and expenses, and therefore taxable profits, of associated enterprises in different tax jurisdictions." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「transfer pricing」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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