The Brattle Group provides advice, expert testimony, and analysis in tax disputes for both taxpayers and the relevant taxing authority. Our principals and senior advisors offer experience in a broad range of tax-related issues, including alleged “abusive” tax shelters (sometimes called “listed transactions”), domestic taxation of multinational companies, leases, transfer pricing, property taxes, natural resource taxes, corporate-owned life insurance, and the debt and equity characteristics of securities.
We supply financial and economic analyses that bear on key judicial doctrines. We also work with outside experts from academia and the business community in providing expert testimony. Our clients have included law firms and large corporations in the U.S. and abroad, as well as government agencies.
Our tax-related experience includes:
- Conducting analyses related to judicial doctrines involving the economic nature of complex transactions, their profitability apart from tax considerations, the steps involved, and the reasonableness of their stated non-tax business purposes
- Providing economic analysis of disputes about the tax implications of contingent business liabilities
- Analyzing economic aspects of disputes about the tax implications of derivatives (such as options) written on currency exchange rates and other underlying assets
- Determining the extent and reasonableness of debt defeasance and interrelated loans
- Evaluating factors in tax-advantaged situations to distinguish whether financial interests are more like debt or equity
- Determining damages in disputes between taxpayers and tax-strategy promoters
- Evaluating the economics of complex leasing, project financing and investment partnership transactions
- Auditing and reconstructing due diligence assessments by taxpayers to determine if economic parameters in the transaction design were reasonable and unbiased
- Analyzing the nature and role of intra-company debt in determining the amount of taxable income at a company’s foreign branches
- Evaluating transfer prices between parts of multinational corporations located in different countries
- Assessing the source and nature of the tax advantage to corporate-owned life insurance
- Estimating fair market value for underlying assets, financial interests, restructured positions, and minority shares, in both income and property tax disputes
- Analyzing the wellhead or minemouth “netback” value of natural resources subject to taxation (or royalties)
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