On 25 April 2023, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) published a memorandum providing guidance to employees of the Treaty and Transfer Pricing Operations (TTPO) practice area in the Large Business and International Division (LB&I) with respect to requests from taxpayers for an APA with the IRS.
The memorandum instructs APMA personnel on how to review and, where appropriate, accept taxpayer APA requests to align LB&I processes for APAs to be consistent with their strategy and maximize the probability of successful, timely, and comprehensive resolution of transfer pricing issues for both taxpayers and the IRS.
The guidance applies to both APA prefiling memoranda and APA submission requests, including renewals, filed from the date of issuance of this guidance forward. Under this guidance, APMA will provide optional pre-submission review to taxpayers that wish to submit prefiling memoranda before submitting a formal APA request. In this pre-submission review, APMA will give a preliminary opinion on whether the APA workstream is well suited to successfully achieve certainty for the proposed covered transactions and whether an alternative workstream is recommended for the taxpayer to consider.
