International Tax Board Agnieszka Talasiewicz Partner, Law / Tax Controversy at Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young provides Tax Controversy

services for

companies. Can you discuss how you would do this?

Tax Controversy services has been an important part of our offering for quite a long time.

Historically, majority of cases meant our involvement in the disputes with the tax authorities. This is still an important part of our work. The number of disputes we have been handling, with a considerable proportion of them ending in a favourable outcome, has positioned us well to develop a set of rules applied to any case:

Agnieszka Talasiewicz - Partner, Law / Tax Controversy at Ernst & Young

• We take individualised approaches to client cases.

• We invariably begin with a review of documents – we rely on facts, not information gathered by communication.

• Before we get involved in a dispute, we give the client a fair assessment of his chances of success and do not recommend initiating a case if a victory is remote and alternatives to a dispute are available.

• At the start of a dispute, we always seek to develop a strategy for further stages.

• Throughout the dispute proceeding we stay in contact with the client and tax authorities alike.

• We build our relations with tax authorities on trust and do not employ any contrivances that might damage the client’s good reputation with the authorities.

• If a case offers potential for success, we succeed (and always seek to ensure the same result in any “no-chance-of- success” cases).

Michal Goj - Senior Manager / Tax Controversy at Ernst & Young

Once the market becomes more mature and global, our tax controversy is often focused on actually avoiding the disputes and ensuring the clients have proper understating of risks. We are involved in the procedures for alternative dispute

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Michal Senior Manager,

Tax Controversy Services - Poland Q

resolutions, such as obtaining advance tax rulings, engaging into discussions with the tax authorities before any dispute arises, and so forth. Tax controversy support is also a valuable add-in to any tax planning ideas, where you have to assess the likelihood of the transaction being successfully challenged under tools and mechanisms available to the tax authorities.

Multinational corporations are facing

a challenging tax

environment: a convergence of global forces has resulted in an increase in the number and size of tax audits, assessments, and disputes with revenue authorities worldwide. Can you explain more about State and Local Tax Controversy, and what they mean for businesses?

In Poland, most of the tax controversy issues concentrate at the State level. However, there are still a number of differences between interpretation and application of tax law between various parts of Poland. Like everywhere else, the Polish government makes all effort to increase effectiveness of tax enforcement. The Polish tax authorities do not opt for increase in number of tax audits, which is more or less the same each year or even decreases, but concentrate on diligence, intensity and most of all targeting the taxpayers. For businesses, it means that they need to understand what the risk of the tax audit in their particular situation is. In case an audit is likely, they would need to allocate significant resources to serve the audit, unless they do the homework first to get prepared. The current approach of the tax authorities means that it is now more likely than few years ago that they would challenge even those tax set-ups, which were not controversial so far.

enactment of a GAAR (General Anti Avoidance Rule). Does Poland use this rule? If not, why? Is there an equivalent rule in use in Poland?

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Enactment of GAAR is one of the hot topics for the tax policy makers globally. A new Ernst &

According to PwC, countries such as UK and India are considering the

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