Asia Tax Bulletin – Spring 2017

A new spring and many new developments on taxation in Asia. This edition of the Asia Tax Bulletin discusses the main tax developments over the past three months in Southeast Asia, India, China, Japan and Korea. A lot is happening, ranging from the new guidelines on foreign investment in the PRC to guidance on the application of the general anti avoidance rules in the PRC and India. Countries are also moving on the BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) front: both Singapore and Hong Kong have been actively signing and promulgating new tax treaties with other countries in order to allow for automatic exchange of information on financial matters. Indonesia and Vietnam have issued new transfer pricing decrees, which in the case of Indonesia focus primarily on the related party documentation requirements which have dramatically lowered the threshold for documentation requirements. Malaysia has announced that is fully committed to adopting the BEPS principles and its minimum standards on dealing with tax treaty abuse and transfer pricing. Singapore has fine-tuned its transfer pricing guidelines based on the latest BEPS standards. Taiwan is looking to reform its dividend imputation system and to introducing a VAT registration for offshore ecom businesses.