On 15 June 2021, Parliament adopted amendments to the Anti Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism and Proliferation Financing (“AML/CTPF”) Act, which, among other things, makes it easier for persons that are subject to the Act to report suspicious transactions taxwise and creates a common customer due diligence tool. The amendments relating to reporting procedures are coming into force on 1 October 2021, and the tool is to be used from 1 January 2022.
 

Every company must have an accounting policy in place that specifies its accounting principles, as well as laying down rules for how its financial statements should be prepared and how its internal documents should move around. The accounting policy must fit the nature of the company’s business.

If an individual is considered to be tax resident simultaneously in two treaty countries (e.g. Latvia and Lithuania) according to their national law, the dispute over the person’s tax resident status will be resolved by treaty article 4(4), which provides for consecutively assessing the following criteria:

We have written earlier about the corporate income tax (“CIT”) treatment of payments made to a non-resident company on which tax must be withheld under section 5 of the CIT Act. This article explores the legal framework, examples and supporting documents for the most common type of payment: management and consulting fees.

To pick up where we left off in our earlier article Ways of reducing tax on profit distribution, which discusses how to minimise your corporate income tax (“CIT”) liability when distributing “new” profits, this article explores some personal income tax (“PIT”) relief an individual can take even if the company has already claimed one of the available CIT reliefs according to the current practice.

To deal with the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 and 2021, the governments have imposed tight restrictions, including travel restrictions, to contain the pandemic. Various exit and entry restrictions forced many people to stay in Latvia or another country. If you are performing your job duties in Latvia then you may need to consider tax treatment aspects. This article explores how Covid-19 affects the way tax residence is determined under Latvian law.

As the tax system evolves, the regulatory authorities have been rearranging their priorities around transfer pricing risks and focusing on increasingly complex cases in recent years. The transfer pricing aspects of intangible assets are climbing up the agenda, so we will be posting a few articles to explain the significance of related-party transactions involving the use of intangibles, as well as looking at transfer pricing trends, common risks, and relevant case law.
 

Having the status of a public benefit organisation (“PBO”) not only demonstrates that the organisation is working for the public good but also motivates the PBO to raise donations and receive various tax and other advantages. Donations are a key source of various PBO public benefit projects, while donors can claim tax advantages. The Ministry of Finance (“MOF”) has issued an informative report on the activities and development of PBOs. This article offers a brief summary and looks at what companies think about this relief and whether it has promoted PBO operations.

On 22 March 2021 the EU Council adopted Directive (EU) 2021/514 (“DAC7”) amending Directive 2011/16/EU on administrative cooperation in the field of taxation, to extend the EU tax transparency rules and reporting obligations to digital platforms and platform operators. Digital platforms and platform operators are required to provide information on the income of sellers using digital platforms from 2023. These rules impose a reporting obligation on digital platforms operating within and outside the EU.

Latvia has adopted minimum mandatory national social insurance contributions (“NSIC”) from 1 July 2021. The parliamentary opposition as well as several business organisations and industry associations asked the MPs in an open letter to postpone adoption of the minimum NSIC scheme until the economy recovers from the Covid-19 restrictions. Despite public criticisms, the new regime came into force on 1 July. This article explores cases where a self-employed person is permitted not to apply minimum NSIC to their income after filing a written request with the State Revenue Service (“SRS”).

The legal form, meaning the contract between related parties and its provisions, has always been among the factors that come into play when assessing whether prices applied in controlled transactions are arm’s length. This article discusses why the legal form of a transaction is important, looks at a common approach to preparing intragroup contracts, and explores some rules that should be followed when drafting those contracts to mitigate transfer pricing risks.

The power of the State Revenue Service (“SRS”) to adjust the amount of tax due is primarily laid down by section 23(1) of the Taxes and Duties Act. The period open to review is limited to three years, and it is generally accepted that a person’s tax burden cannot be revised outside this period. Yet the SRS takes the view that a person’s obligation to pay taxes is not limited in time and is not really covered by the statute of limitations. We have encountered a practice in which, on finding an incorrect tax payment for a period outside the three years, the person was given the option of voluntarily filing the relevant tax returns and paying additional taxes. To stimulate this voluntary action, the person was warned that the SRS might pass their information to the Finance Police in order to decide on starting a criminal prosecution. This practice is now developing in such a way that a taxpayer’s mistake in filing tax returns for earlier periods is interpreted as voluntary performance of their obligation and an action that cannot be rectified.
 

This article completes what we wrote a couple of weeks ago.

The Import One-Stop Shop (“IOSS”), a special VAT scheme for distance sales of goods imported from third countries or third territories, will be implemented across the EU from 1 July 2021 as part of extensive amendments to the VAT rules for e-commerce companies. This article explores an intermediary’s obligations and liability under the IOSS.

The G7 finance ministers announced an agreement on 5 June in which the participating countries committed to new taxing rights allowing countries to reallocate some portion of large multinational companies’ profits to markets (i.e. where sales arise – “Pillar One”) as well as enacting a global minimum tax rate of at least 15% (“Pillar Two”). The meeting marked an early test of whether the US position on the OECD Inclusive Framework’s “Taxation of the Digitalising Economy” project would provide momentum to finding a common base for agreement.