Tax News Highlights: February 2023

In this podcast, Zoe Andrews and Tanja Velling discuss the Upper Tribunal’s decisions in Harrison, confirming the demise of the doctrine of “staleness” in relation to discovery assessments, and Morrisons on the standard to be applied when reviewing the First-tier Tribunal’s assessment of a multi-factorial test. 

They also discuss HMRC’s Transfer Pricing and Diverted Profits Tax statistics for 2021-2022, showing inter alia a significant reduction in the number of Advance Thin Capitalisation Agreements, and the report on HMRC’s Financial Institution Notice powers, confirming that HMRC will not use the powers to request taxpayer location data, but may use them to request information on a financial institution’s employees and contractors. 

The podcast further provides an update on international tax reform, looking in particular at the impact assessment and administrative guidance recently published by the OECD, discusses the OECD’s new Manual on the Handling of Multilateral Mutual Agreement Procedures and Advance Pricing Arrangements and notes HM Treasury’s more detailed response to its online sales tax consultation, following the announcement at the Autumn Statement that no such tax would be introduced.