UK will lead a survey into the practicality of global transfer pricing guidelines, which is expected to enhance the understanding of transfer pricing as well as offer new international operational guidelines for tax administrations and taxpayers.

The survey would have links to the work on transfer pricing by the OECD, a top official of UK's HMRC stated at the recently held 11th Annual Tax Planning Strategies meeting in Paris.

The survey is expected to bring out a greater reliance on integrated documentation systems that have been effective in rooting out key TP issues. It would also help to simplify transfer pricing and allow taxpayers to share more information with the authorities. The survey would also help tax administrations to rely more on economists to decide whether a transfer pricing case was worth following up as such disputes are time consuming and expensive operations.

Considering that tax authorities have lost a lot of TP cases, there is a movement amongst tax authorities like the IRS to allow economists play a bigger role which could help to decide whether a case is actionable.