INDIA Law and Practice Contributed by: Deepak Chopra, Harpreet Singh Ajmani, Rohan Khare, Pulkit Pandey and Priyam Bhatnagar, AZB & Partners
• the primary adjustment is made in respect of an assessment year commencing on or before 1 April 2016. In 2019, amendments were introduced thereby allowing the taxpayer to repatriate secondary adjustment from any of its AE and also gave an option to pay an additional tax at 18% (plus applicable surcharge on tax) in case the taxpayer is not able to repatriate the money into India.
providing certainty to the taxpayer by allowing them to opt for a unilateral, bilateral or multilat - eral APA, for five prospective years along with a roll back option for four previous years. Fur - ther, the APA programme does not impose any threshold in terms of the value of the transaction upon a taxpayer. As per data available at the time of writing, dur - ing FY 2023–24, India has entered into 86 Uni - lateral APAs covering 224 international transac - tions, and 39 Bilateral APAs (BAPAs) covering 181 international transactions. Unilateral APAs involve AEs spread across 74 countries, with the majority being in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, and Germany. In the case of BAPA, the USA is the front-runner. Other treaty partners include the UK, Japan, Sin - gapore, Germany, and France. 7.2 Administration of Programmes In India, the APA programme is administered by CBDT. There are two different set-ups for the processing of APAs and to help the CBDT to enter into an APA. The first set-up comprises the competent authority of India (which is the Joint Secretary (FT&TR-I) in the Ministry of Finance], and their representatives. The second set-up is the APA team which is a defined term in Rule 10F(j) of the IT Rules, which means Advance Pricing Agreement team consisting of Income Tax Authorities as consti - tuted by the CBDT and including such number of experts in economics, statistics, law or any other field as may be nominated by the DGIT (International Taxation). In terms of the data available in public domain, at present the APA team, constituted by the CBDT, consists of one
6. Cross-Border Information Sharing 6.1 Sharing Taxpayer Information
India has a strong tax treaty network that includes double-tax avoidance agreements (DTAA) with around 104 countries (a compre - hensive agreement with 96 countries/territories and a limited agreement with eight jurisdictions) and tax information exchange agreements with 23 countries/territories. 6.2 Joint Audits Although there is no formal framework for joint audits under the Indian transfer pricing regime, the Tax Authorities have actively been exercis - ing the option of seeking data under Exchange of Information agreements and also evaluating data from the master file and the local file main - tained under country-by-country (CbC) report - ing. 7. Advance Pricing Agreements (APAs) 7.1 Programmes Allowing for Rulings Regarding Transfer Pricing The APA programme was introduced in India in the Finance Act, 2012 and which aimed at
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