New Transfer Pricing Documentation Requirements in Poland

In January 2017, Poland introduced new transfer pricing documentation requirements affecting a large amount of multinational companies conducting business in Poland. The first upcoming deadline is getting close since the first affected entities are required to have the documentation for financial year 2017 finalized before March 31 – are you prepared?

Background

As many other countries, Poland aims at adapting domestic transfer pricing documentation to the updated three-tier approach in the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines on transfer pricing documentation. The new regulations are a significant step forward, but some important deviations from the OECD Guidelines can be noted.

Overview – New Polish Transfer Pricing Documentation Requirements

As already mentioned, a large amount of multinational companies will be affected by the new Polish regulations on transfer pricing documentation. There are various different thresholds involved, but as a general principle, all Polish entities with either total revenues or expenses exceeding EUR 2 million will be affected to some extent.

The updated OECD Guidelines introduces a three-tier approach on transfer pricing documentation. More specifically, this approach includes a Master File, a Local File and a Country-by-Country Report. With the implementation of new transfer pricing documentation regulations, Poland is adapting to the overall concept of this three-tier approach.

In addition to this, affected taxpayers will be obliged to file a summary report on related party transactions (CIT-TP) as well as a taxpayer’s statement where the taxpayer has to declare that transfer pricing documentation has been prepared in accordance with the new regulations. It shall be noted that both the CIT-TP and the taxpayer’s statement will have to be attached to the annual tax return as appendices.

To determine if taxpayers are obliged to prepare the different reports, the following thresholds in relation to revenue/costs are applied:

• Local File > EUR 2 million
• Taxpayer’s statement > EUR 2 million
• CIT-TP > EUR 10 million
• Master File > EUR 20 million
• Country-by-Country report > EUR 750 million

Another additional requirement introduced by Poland entails that taxpayer’s with revenue/costs exceeding EUR 10 million are obliged to conduct benchmarking analyses. In cases where local comparables are available for the benchmarking analysis, it is required to conduct the analysis with such data. Hence, regional or global benchmarking analyses will generally not be accepted.

Comments

The new Polish documentation requirements are both extensive and relatively complicated. Therefore, we recommend multinational companies with operations in Poland to contact us in order to analyze how they are affected by the new regulations as soon as possible in order to stay compliant.