Значење на трансферните цени од даночен аспект
Importance of the transfer pricing from a tax perspective

Summary/Abstract: Both multinational companies and tax authorities are facing increasingly with transfer pricing issues over the last years. The reason for this is not difficult to be understood. The role and the number of multinational companies in the world trade have increased rapidly over the last 20 years. The number of foreign direct investments and establishment of foreign subsidiaries have an increasing trend. This expansion makes necessity of transfer of tangible and intangible assets between parent companies and their foreign subsidiaries. One issue that arises in this context is how to establish prices for these cross-border transfers, since they have direct impact on the tax burden. Consequently, transfer pricing can be used for tax manipulations.Tax authorities do not accept such transfers to be performed based on negotiated prices, which can be a result of various companies’ motivations, where such prices may be quite different from the market prices established between two independent companies. Special problems arise for both tax authorities and multinational in case of establishment transfer prices for intangible assets, such as: patents, formulas, designs, know-how, licences or provision of management services, financial services, trade names and trade marks.Because of the abovementioned reasons, transfer pricing became important part of the strategy of multinational enterprises. All countries in the world make efforts to unify the legislation concerning this area and to exchange information, which is expected response to the increasing globalization.OECD countries, as well as many others, accepted arm’s length principle, as a basic one concerning establishment of transfer pricing within multinational companies. OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines proposes five transfer pricing methods, which have been accepted by the national legislation of the member countries, as well as by many other countries. Application of the arm’s length principle and the proposed transfer pricing methods should bring to an end or at least decrease the transfer pricing manipulations, which have been made in the past and nowadays by the multinational companies.Transfer pricing is not an exact science and very often tax authorities may have different opinion than those of the multinational companies. Sometimes even tax authorities of different countries may have different opinion concerning the same issue. Therefore, very often transfer pricing issues have their finalization at court. Application of transfer pricing methods and the arm’s length principle is in very early stage in Macedonia. Macedonian tax authorities do not have any practice in transfer pricing issues so far. Therefore, there is very big task and expectations ahead of our country concerning transfer pricing practice.

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