Fewer files, closer reading

Something is happening in two tax administrations at once, and it is being reported as relief.

Denmark has narrowed the range of companies that must prepare transfer pricing documentation. Canada has consulted on simplified documentation in four cases: small taxpayers, small transfers of tangible property, small intragroup services and small loans.

Read individually, each is a sensible piece of housekeeping. Read together, they describe a decision about where to spend attention.

What Denmark actually did

Worth being precise, because the common summary of this change is wrong in one word.

From income year 2025, Denmark runs two separate tests, and they do different things.

The second is a limited obligation, not an exemption. It applies to a taxpayer who meets the employee test alone or together with consolidated companies.

The conjunction matters. Fewer than 250 employees and one of the two size tests. A group at 250 employees is outside this regime regardless of its balance sheet.

And the limitation is one of scope. Documentation remains required for controlled transactions with persons and permanent establishments registered outside the EU and EEA in a country with which Denmark has no double tax treaty containing a transfer pricing provision.

So the practical question for a Danish subsidiary is not whether it has fallen below a threshold. It is which counterparties sit outside that treaty perimeter, because those are the transactions that still carry the full obligation.

skat.dk — transfer pricing and documentation requirements

The penalties did not move.

Where adequate documentation was not prepared and submitted in time, the Tax Agency may determine the income on a discretionary basis.

Why this is not deregulation

An administration that removes a filing obligation from most taxpayers has not decided the subject matters less. It has decided that reading thin files from small groups was a poor use of examiner time, and that the same hours produce more sitting with the groups that remain in scope.

The effect on any individual company is therefore the opposite of what the headline suggests. If your group is above the thresholds, the population you are being compared against has just been reduced, and the resource per file has just gone up.

There is a second effect that takes longer to appear. When a documentation obligation is narrowed, the file that is still required becomes more diagnostic. It is no longer one of thousands filed because the rules said so. It is one of a smaller number filed because this taxpayer, specifically, was considered worth asking.

That is a different reading environment, and it rewards a different kind of document.

What to do about it

Nothing structural, and nothing this quarter.

Take each entity in your group that sits in a jurisdiction which has changed its thresholds in the last eighteen months. For each, answer two questions.

Are you still in scope — and on which test.

If you are, has anything about the file changed to reflect that you are now in a smaller group being read more closely.

If the answer to the second question is no, the file is still written for the old population.

So: when the number of files an administration reads falls by half, does yours become less interesting, or more?

02At the OECD

One report in the minerals series is listed for the Monday of the week this issue covers.

Three publications with tax relevance carry September dates on the OECD's forthcoming list.

The first of those dates has already passed by the time this issue reaches you. The forthcoming list is a schedule, not a confirmation that a report appeared.

Earlier reports in the minerals series applied the mineral pricing framework to bauxite and to lithium, using the comparable uncontrolled price method to help resource-rich jurisdictions price exports. The subtitle of this one has not been published, so what it covers is not confirmed. It is worth two minutes on the day if your group moves commodities between related parties.

oecd.org — forthcoming titles

03From the courts

One decision this issue, and it sits directly on top of the piece above. Denmark is narrowing who has to document. This is what happens to a file that is read closely.

Denmark — National Tax Tribunal, decided 12 May 2025, published 10 December 2025 as SKM2025.704.LSR, case 19-0043023

A Danish company sold intangibles to an affiliate. Its valuation applied a required return of 20% to the business as a whole, and 8% to the routine functions the company was keeping.

The tribunal agreed that this was wrong. Routine functions are an integral part of the business, and applying a lower discount rate to them alone inflated their value. On the Tax Agency's figures, using 20% throughout puts the routine functions at about 14% of the present value of total cash flow. The company's own calculation had put them at just over half.

It did not simply endorse the assessment. It accepted the reasoning and reduced the increase by DKK 60,285,283.

The point is not that 8% was the wrong number. It is that two discount rates inside one valuation are a statement: that one part of the business is safer than the whole it belongs to. That is a claim about risk, and a claim has to survive being read as one.

Worth noting how the burden ran. Because the adjustment was made under section 2 of the Assessment Act rather than as an estimated assessment, the administration had to prove the reported price was not at arm's length. It did so using the independent price a third party had paid for the shares, the company's own two DCF valuation reports, and the company's own transfer pricing documentation. The taxpayer's own material, in other words.

info.skat.dk — SKM2025.704.LSR

04What changed around the world

Belgium — the GIR notification deadline, and what it actually covers. The 30 September deadline for notifying which entity will file the GloBE Information Return is narrower than it looks. It covers fiscal years beginning between 31 December 2023 and 31 December 2024 and ending no later than 28 February 2025. It also covers years beginning on or after 1 January 2025 and ending no later than 31 May 2025.

Every group entity owes the notification annually, but a group may designate a single Belgian entity to file once for all of them. Filing runs through MyMinfin and needs the Pillar 2 role or mandate; the Biztax route works only until the end of 2026.

The clarification was never published as a news item. The page was edited.

finances.belgium.be — GIR filing entity notification