The Institute of Chartered Accountants of T&T (ICATT) yesterday began a three-day course on international taxation of oil and gas activities. The facilitators are Patrick Ellingsworth and Bart Kosters. Ellingsworth is a former head of tax at Royal Dutch Shell and chair of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) business and industry advisory committee in the United States. Kosters is from the Netherlands office of the firm IBFD, a cross-border tax specialist. Domestic tax rules in relation to cross-border activities, the array of taxes and other forms of government recovery from natural resources and the relationship between tax treaties were some of the topics Ellingsworth broached on day one.
He also guided course attendees through producer considerations, natural tax regimes, fiscal stability and major concepts in domestic natural resource tax law. He looked at different upstream, mid-stream and downstream tax regimes across the globe and lectured on the major concepts in international aspects of natural resource tax. Ellingsowrth showed his audience current trends in drilling for oil and gas and the impact they were having on tax regimes in the deep waters of Brazil, as well as the impact of fracking onshore in the US. He also examined what future taxation will look like as the world deals with carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. The last day of the course will focus on transfer pricing in the oil and gas industry.