TRANSFER PRICES AND MARKET VALUE OF REINSURANCE TRANSACTIONS

As a result of the increasingly sustainable economic and financial crisis, which is characterized by the diminishing of the sums due to the state budget, the interest of more and more countries, including Romania, for the legalization and control over the transfer prices increases. Transfer pricing is an activity involving the execution of client related actions for a specific financial product through multiple intermediaries and / or tax jurisdictions. These transfer prices are used in different industries and, in the last period, have been used, in particular, by reinsurance companies as a result of difficult economic conditions and increasing competitiveness. Under these circumstances, insurers need to be aware that they will carry out tax inspections whose role is to verify using the market value principle, the compliance of their prices with the affiliated reinsurers in order to avoid misuse of those prices, by exaggerating costs and artificially reducing potential profits. This study emphasizes that reinsurance contracts made by affiliated companies are not the issue, but the way in which transactions are carried out that do not accurately reflect the risks transferred, their costs and the respect of the market value principle. If they are not carefully controlled, these reinsurance companies have every reason to use transfer pricing to move the profit between tax jurisdictions with differentiated rates of taxation, thus minimizing total corporate tax.