In response to a number of large corporate failures, risk management has recently become a major consideration for most organizations. At the same time, taxation has been recognized as an area having its own unique risk profiles. This book provides a practical guide for those working in today's ever-changing corporate environment. It contains an introduction to tax risk management and discussions on the tax control framework that allow corporate tax departments to identify and manage companies' tax-related risks. The book also includes country chapters, which provide practical examples of the development and application of tax control frameworks.

Academic research shows that well-known principal-agent and capital market problems are strongly influenced by tax considerations. Against this background, this volume is the first to present a fully-fledged overview of the interdependence of tax and corporate governance. Not only the basic political, legal and economic questions but also major topics like income measurement, shareholding structures, corporate social responsibility and tax shelter disclosure are covered.

In reaction to the recent financial crisis and corporate failures at the beginning of the millennium, the emphasis of the business community in corporate governance has shifted towards internal control and risk management issues. As a result, risk management discussion has reached an unprecedented level for academics and practitioners alike. This international, multidisciplinary book provides a comprehensive overview of the risk management landscape, encompassing its challenges and problems and taking stock of its influence on both companies and society as a whole. The eminent contributors review historical and current provisions relating to internal control and risk management in Europe and in the USA. They address the interconnected consequences of the necessity of risk management, and illustrate that a comprehensive approach needs to be further improved. The pros and cons of both the rule-based and the principle-based approaches are analysed, showing that the latter makes it more feasible for sound business practices to be combined with strategic company goals, and for the relationship between entrepreneurial risk taking and sound risk governance management to be in equilibrium. The book also presents a balanced supervision framework, which both promotes prevention of excessive risk taking and tackles risk failure.

This report is the ninth edition of the OECD's Tax Administration Series. It provides internationally comparative data on aspects of tax systems and their administration in 59 advanced and emerging economies.

The report describes the development of a new risk management culture within professions, companies and governments. The obsession with managing risk is creating organisations which are not so much risk averse as ‘responsibility averse’. In medicine, doctors are practising ‘defensive medicine’ where opinions are heavily qualified with caveats and patients left to make big decisions. The report also refers to growing evidence that since Enron’s failure, major accountancy firms are declining to work with ‘high risk’ clients - the very ones that should be thoroughly audited. “When disclaimer paragraphs are longer than the professional opinions they follow, we know something has gone wrong,” says author Professor Michael Power, a director of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics. “In the interests of transparency, small print should be made large and ruled out as a secondary risk management ploy. “The trends in professions such as medicine and auditing signal a withdrawal of individual judgement from the public. Minimal records are kept, staff are cautioned about the use of email, and normal correspondence is littered with disclaimers. The risk management of everything implies a society of ‘small print’.” Power sees the rise of the ‘risk management of everything’ as a related trend to the audit culture, which included the government’s now widely criticised love of targets as a policy tool. The Audit Explosion, Power’s previous Demos pamphlet, predicted that the overuse of audit leads to a focus on measurable outputs rather than real outcomes. “The most influential dimension of the audit explosion is the process by which [organisations] are made auditable and structured to conform to the need to be monitored,” Power wrote in 1994. Power’s new book argues that risk management is the ‘new audit’ and is having a similar distorting effect on the performance of professionals, companies and government.

CCH's new Tax Function Effectiveness addresses the unique challenges of tax function departments. The tax function's objectives should themselves be driven by what is happening in the business and the wider business and regulatory environment.

This sixth peer review of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance analyses the corporate governance framework and practices relating to corporate risk management, in the private sector and in state-owned enterprises. The review covers 26 jurisdictions and is based on a general survey of all participating jurisdictions in December 2012, as well as an in-depth review of corporate risk management in Norway, Singapore and Switzerland. The report finds that while risk-taking is a fundamental driving force in business and entrepreneurship, the cost of risk management failures is often underestimated, both externally and internally, including the cost in terms of management time needed to rectify the situation. The reports thus concludes that corporate governance should ensure that risks are understood, managed, and, when appropriate, communicated.

This book provides an in-depth introduction to knowledge risk management (KRM) as well as methods, tools and cases to address knowledge risk management issues in both the public and private sector. It focuses on the integration of knowledge risks into the holistic risk management of organizations. In addition, this book is accompanied by an external website that includes additional checklists, videos and company cases. The combination of a sound theoretical framework along with practical instruments, tools and ancillary materials makes this book a unique, interactive book for professionals, managers, and executives as well as students, academics and policy makers.

Banking is an increasingly global business, with a complex network of international transactions within multinational groups and with international customers. This book provides a thorough, practical analysis of international taxation issues as they affect the banking industry. Thoroughly explaining banking’s significant benefits and risks and its taxable activities, the book’s broad scope examines such issues as the following: taxation of dividends and branch profits derived from other countries; transfer pricing and branch profit attribution; taxation of global trading activities; tax risk management; provision of services and intangible property within multinational groups; taxation treatment of research and development expenses; availability of tax incentives such as patent box tax regimes; swaps and other derivatives; loan provisions and debt restructuring; financial technology (FinTech); group treasury, interest flows, and thin capitalisation; tax havens and controlled foreign companies; and taxation policy developments and trends. Case studies show how international tax analysis can be applied to specific examples. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (OECD BEPS) measures and how they apply to banking taxation are discussed. The related provisions of the OECD Model Tax Convention are analysed in detail. The banking industry is characterised by rapid change, including increased diversification with new banking products and services, and the increasing significance of activities such as shadow banking outside current regulatory regimes. For all these reasons and more, this book will prove to be an invaluable springboard for problem solving and mastering international taxation issues arising from banking. The book will be welcomed by corporate counsel, banking law practitioners, and all professionals, officials, and academics concerned with finance and its tax ramifications.

Prominent among initiatives addressing the urgent need for a common understanding between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and national tax authorities about risks and risk assessment is the International Compliance Assurance Programme (ICAP), which provides a channel for MNEs to engage in simultaneous discussions with multiple national tax administrations, thus enhancing the potential for advance tax assurance. To a certain extent, the ICAP represents the internationalization of Co-operative Compliance frameworks which were, until then, restricted within the borders of single jurisdictions. This book is the first to investigate Co-operative Compliance alongside with the ICAP, describing developments in twelve countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Following a general introduction, two opening perspectives on the ICAP are presented, one from the OECD and one from a participating tax administration (the Netherlands), leading to the twelve country reports and a special chapter on transfer pricing, which is the main issue in international tax disputes. Specific elements reviewed include the following: criteria to enter the programme; the range of taxes covered by the programme; real-time consultation procedures; appeal procedures within the programme; the possibility to ‘agree to disagree’ and to continue Co-operative Compliance even in cases of litigation; risk management strategies within tax authorities; corporate administrative compliance burden; and main sources of tax uncertainty. Country reports are contributed by tax professionals and tax academics experienced in dealing with Co-operative Compliance and the ICAP. Each report addresses the same questions, so that all the reports cover the same features of domestic relationship approaches and the ICAP. A final chapter reviews the collected contributions and offers some concluding remarks. Although the ICAP process probably will undergo further adjustments, it is certain that the road to more international cooperation between tax authorities and MNEs is now open. This timely book, as a comparative review of the implementation of the ICAP among leading jurisdictions active in global trade, provides matchless insights into trends, similarities, differences and their implications. It will be welcomed by all stakeholders in the international tax community, including lawyers, taxation authorities and academics.