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Do what you love, and you will never have to work a day. This quote, earlier attributed to Chinese philosopher Confucius, is inspiring and true.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Transfer Pricing Guidelines provide five methodologies that are widely used and accepted by almost all tax authorities in determining transfer prices. These include three traditional transaction methods – comparable uncontrolled price (CUP) method, resale price method (RPM), and cost-plus method (CPM); and two transactional profit methods – transactional net margin method (TNMM) and profit split method (PSM).

The COVID-19 pandemic has been called many names. If we are to be straight and definitive about it, most see it as a spread of a viral disease, a contagion that halted our way of life as we knew it before the pandemic struck.

Equity-based compensation is an employee benefit given in the form of stock options, restricted share awards, stock appreciation rights, and restricted stock units, which may or may not pertain to the shares of stocks of the employer-grantor itself. This is commonly used as part of employee-retention programs.

Clearly, working from home (WFH) is here to stay. No other sector is more affected than the Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) sector. Hence, when the government announced that their employees must go back to their registered offices, the whole industry was in tumult.

In the Philippines alone, e-commerce is expected to further flourish as the government continues to take active steps in digitalizing government processes. The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) continues to ramp up initiatives in accelerating free internet connectivity especially in remote areas, while the DICT’s attached agency, the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center, is finalizing its roadmap with amendments to the country’s existing National Cybersecurity Plan.

As more companies choose to adopt work-from-home (WFH) arrangements, existing registered business enterprises (RBEs) in the information and technology-business process management (IT-BPM) sector may now transfer their existing registration with the Board of Investments (BOI) until December 31, 2022. Under the guidelines released by the Department of Trade and Industry in Memorandum Circular No. 22-19 on October 18, 2022, IT-BPM RBEs, such as those registered with the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) and other investment promotion agencies (IPAs), have until year-end to transfer their registration to the BOI. The transfer applies to IT-BPM RBEs with existing tax incentives under Section 311 of the Tax Code or those with approved tax incentives until September 14, 2022.

Under the rules, Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) registered companies are required to operate within the economic zones to be entitled to tax incentives. However, due to the pandemic, the Fiscal Incentives Review Board (FIRB) temporarily allowed PEZA companies to adopt a work-from-home (WFH) arrangement for up to a certain percentage of the workforce, while still enjoying tax incentives.