Arm's Length Principle vs. Formulary Apportionment in BEPS Action 13: Stakeholders’ Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses comment-letter lobbying by different stakeholders to influence OECD’s documentation rules on transfer pricing within the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project. Using a content analysis of stakeholders’ comments to a discussion draft on documentation requirements of Action 13 of OECD’s BEPS policies, we offer some evidence that professional accounting firms may have viewed the new documentation requirements as a stealth paradigm shift away from the arm’s length principle (ALP) to formulary allocation (FA). Our analysis suggests that other stakeholders from academia and civil society were sceptical of the comments expressed by the professional tax firms, regarding them as a means to resist changes in transfer pricing documentation. We suggest that professional accounting firms’ comments may have represented implicit lobbying against changes to the ALP regime that may have been considered beneficial to taxpayers in reducing their aggregate tax burden despite its implementation and rule complexity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.087 | 0.122 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".