외국법인의 국내 고정사업장과 관련한 과세문제의 연구－Bloomberg Limited Partnership의 사례를 중심으로－ = Research on Taxation of Permanent Establishment of a Foreign Corporation－Case of Bloomberg Limited Partnership－

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Tax treaties and tax law allow a source country to levy on active business income of foreign corporations with the concept of “permanent establishment” (‘PE’ hereafter). However, vague definition of PE opens possibilities for legal conflict with foreign countries, which compete for taxing right on the same income, and foreign corporations.
This study eloquently shows the difficulty in determining the existence of a PE, which caused the court to pronounce contradictory sentences for the issue recently in separate Bloomberg Limited Partnership (‘BLP’ hereafter) cases. Specifically, the court delivered conflicting judgements on whether BLP’s fixed place of business in Korea was maintained solely for the purpose of carrying on any activity of a “preparatory or auxiliary”－not an “essential or significant”－character, which is up to subjective interpretation of the Korea－U.S. Tax Treaty.
Additionally, this study analyzes the issues derived from a PE－specifically, the value－added tax (VAT) reverse charge and the income attributable to a PE (‘PE income’ hereafter). The VAT reverse charge is intended to maintain neutrality and equity of VAT under “the destination principle” by asking a VAT－exempted business which receives the supply of services from foreign corporations that do not have a PE to collect the VAT at the time of payment for such services. However, such effect is unfeasible in case a non－entrepreneur receives the supply, and furthermore, the effect of export promotion gets globally crowded out, which results in the fallacy of composition. Accordingly, “the origin principle” can be considered as an alternative to “the destination principle”.
Like the BLP case, the “profit method” is generally used to compute PE income because of difficulty in the practical use of the “transaction method”. However, PE income is affected by market conditions so much with the profit method that the basic assumption for transfer pricing－functional or product comparability－can hardly be met. Consequently, the transaction method should be actively used to coincide with the “arm’s length principle” by searching for appropriate transaction prices.

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