The Italian Desk of Ernst & Young in New York has published comments on the new US-Italy Tax Treaty. The new Treaty entered to force with the exchange of instruments of ratification on December 17, 2010.
The pending 1999 U.S.-Italy Tax Treaty entered into force on December 16, 2009, when Italy and the United States exchanged the instruments of ratification.
The new U.S.-Italy Tax Treaty (PDF) is effective from February 1, 2009, for income subject to withholding tax and from January 1 2010, for all other provisions of the treaty.
The 1999 U.S.-Italy Tax Treaty remained pending for ten years due to certain general anti abuse provisions for the application of the reduced withholding tax rates on dividends interest and royalties, and some other issues concerning the exchange of information provision of the treaty and the arbitration procedure to resolve treaty disputes. Italy waived the anti abuse provisions by means of the exchange of diplomatic notes in April 2006 and February 2007 and ratified the treaty in April 2009.
The new treaty includes provision on the creditability in the United States of the Italian Regional Tax on Production Activities (IRAP), the application of the US branch profits tax and new withholding tax rates on dividends, interest and royalties, plus a limitation of benefits provision in the protocol.
The new withholding tax rates are 5 percent for inter-company dividends (namely, dividends paid to a company which owned at least 25 percent of the stock of the distributing company for more than twelve months), 10 percent on interest and zero percent on royalties from copyrights.
The OECD Committee on Fiscal Affairs has released as a discussion draft a Report on “The Granting of Treaty Benefits with respect to the Income of Collective Investment Vehicles”(PDF) which contains proposed changes to the Commentary on the OECD Model Tax Convention dealing with the question of the extent to which either collective investment vehicles (CIVs) or their investors are entitled to treaty benefits on income received by the CIVs. The Report is a modified version of the Report “Granting of Treaty Benefits with respect to the Income of Collective Investment Vehicles” (PDF) of the Informal Consultative Group on the Taxation of Collective Investment Vehicles and Procedures for Tax Relief for Cross-Border Investors (“ICG”) which was released on 12 January 2009. In that original Report, the ICG addressed the legal and policy issues specific to CIVs and formulated a comprehensive set of recommendations addressing the issues presented by CIVs in the cross-border context.
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