Corporate Taxation and the International Challenge

Abstract

It is argued th**at the higher degree of economic integration across borders and the international trend towards a reduction of corporate income tax rates have had a significant impact on the Danish corporate tax regime in recent years. Accordingly, during the last ten years the Danish statutory corporate tax rate has been lowered further, while several government actions at the same time have been taken in order to combat international tax avoidance and evasion. As a result, new anti-avoidance provisions have been introduced and some of the older anti-avoidance provisions have been tightened in order to prevent base erosion and profit shifting. Thus, to some extent Denmark has already tried to address a number of the key pressure areas mentioned in the recently published OECD BEPS report, such as international mismatches in entity and instrument characterization, the tax treatment of related party debt financing, transfer pricing and the effectiveness of anti-avoidance measures. However, the article concludes that these anti-avoidance provisions often suffer from being quite complex, very broad in scope and open to criticism from an EU law perspective.