Modern international trends in taxation of transnational corporations: assessment of efficiency and consequences of applying methodological approaches to the budget

Abstract

The object of the study is transnational corporations. That is, companies that operate and have legal entities in various jurisdictions, which allows them to transfer the corporate tax base – profit to jurisdictions with minimal corporate tax. The transfer is carried out through the use of intra-group transfer prices. The subject of the study is current trends, ideas and international efforts in the taxation of multinational corporations. Both such trends themselves were investigated, and a computational experiment was conducted to assess the applicability of a possible methodology for calculating the profit tax of a subsidiary of such a corporation in Russia and the possible consequences for the budget from its application. The main conclusions of the study are as follows: at present, an international consensus is gradually being formed that the total profit of a transnational corporation should be distributed in a reasonable and fair way among the countries of its activities, an understanding of the need to consolidate such an order at the international level is being formed; however, no single understanding of approaches to taxation of transnational corporations, nor a single methodology capable of implementing them in practice. The scientific novelty is the author's reduction of the principle of tax neutrality from the classical principle of tax neutrality. In addition, the contribution of the authors is to demonstrate the fundamental efficiency of one of these methods by the example of calculating indicators based on open reporting data of a particular organization, as well as the consequences of using such a methodology for the budget.