Seminar focuses on intricacies of amended Income Tax law

KPMG yesterday hosted a breakfast seminar on the recent IT law amendments providing an opportunity to over 100 Senior C-suite professionals to understand the implications and intricacies involved in the sweeping changes which were introduced last week to Oman’s income tax law by Royal Decree 9/2017 published in the Official Gazette on February 26, 2017

Ashok Hariharan (inset), Partner and Head of Tax for KPMG Lower Gulf, anchored the seminar presenting his detailed insights into the key amendments, including the much debated and far reaching change pertaining to withholding tax on fees for services, interest payments and dividends on shares and its applicability in several domestic and international tax scenarios and real life situations like cost sharing arrangements, secondments of staff, revenue and risk sharing arrangements contracts.

Ashok explained how the latest amendments may result in increasing the costs of businesses operating in Oman, given that many foreign taxpayers will expect the taxes imposed on their incomes to be borne by local businesses.

Ashok also covered his analysis of many procedural amendments that have been introduced in the tax law and how the government is gearing up to shift the prevalent tax compliance regime in Oman from a tax audit approach towards a self-assessment approach, involving stricter penalty and punishment provisions.

Some of the other changes in tax law that Ashok touched upon during his presentation included the 3 per cent tax regime for micro establishments, requirement of tax card by all tax payers, removal of tax exemptions and tax treatment of Islamic finance transactions, on which KPMG had acted as advisors to the Government of Oman. and reinsurance