Who should bear the cost of tax transparency?

THE Ministry of Finance (MOF) announced in June that Singapore is committed to implementing a new global financial disclosure regime: country-by-country reporting (CbCR).

CbCR is one of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) recommendations made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and is being adopted widely across the world. Essentially, under CbCR, large multinational groups will be required to report key financial information on a country-by-country basis to the revenue authority in the home jurisdiction of their parent company.

So, many major Singapore-headquartered groups will be required to prepare and present this information to the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) shortly. Major foreign- owned groups with operations in Singapore are unlikely in most cases to have to lodge such a report with IRAS, but they are likely (depending on the location in which their parent company is tax resident) to lodge such information with an offshore revenue authority, including information about their Singapore operations.