Ruslan Melnychenko

The subject of the scientific work is analysis of the essence of the “transfer pricing” concept. It has been proven that transfer pricing is an economic and legal tool used by business entities for their tax burden optimization.

It has been concluded that the concept “transfer price” means the price generated by multinational corporations in the process of commercial activity between the affiliated companies located in different countries and, correspondingly, different tax jurisdictions. In essence, transfer pricing means intra-company pricing of goods transferred between the enterprise subdivisions located in different countries. Base erosion by means of transfer pricing can be performed not only based on the price manipulating by the affiliated companies, but also as a result of manipulating incomes and expenditures. The latter is accompanied by the financial resource withdrawal outside the national economy and its concentration in the low taxation jurisdictions.

Transfer pricing bears serious risks both for an individual country and for the world economy. Contractual freedom of transnational corporations and industrial and financial groups cannot be unlimited regardless of the principle of freedom of contracts in the private law relations. Economic activity of such business entities must subject to a strict control on the part of the country. In the process of transfer pricing tax control, the controlling state agencies are intended to prevent the decrease of tax liabilities by shifting the income to low tax jurisdictions by taxpayers.