Bloomberg Interviews Former GE Tax Counsel Peter Barnes on BEPS, Country-by-Country Reporting, and Documentation

Bloomberg BNA interviewed Peter A. Barnes regarding his tenure as Senior International Tax Counsel at General Electric and his views on documentation, country-by-country reporting, tax competition, formulary apportionment, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's project on base erosion. For a PDF of the article, please click on the above link.
 
Excerpt taken from the article. Reproduced with permission from Tax Management Transfer Pricing Report, Vol. 22 No. 17, 1/9/2014. Copyright © 2014 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) http://www.bna.com.
 
Peter Barnes, former chief tax counsel  at General Electric, reflects on his 23 years with the company Dec. 13, 2013, sharing his views on documentation, country-by-country reporting, tax competition, formulary apportionment, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's project on base erosion in general. Barnes, who has long advocated simplifying documentation requirements, describes the data companies would need to supply to tax authorities ‘‘in a perfect world.'' He also warns that country-by-country reporting likely will lead to public disclosure of information about companies' tax payments to different countries despite reassuring statements from the OECD on the subject. The former GE official is now a senior fellow at Duke University and recently joined the Washington, D.C., firm Caplin & Drysdale as ‘‘of counsel.''