The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on August 16, 2019, affirmed the U.S. Tax Court's decision in Amazon.com, Inc. v. Commissioner, concerning the definition of intangible property in the transfer pricing regulations, as applied to determine the compensable value of a cost sharing buy-in.
Many taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had long disagreed over whether the definition of 'intangibles' in the transfer pricing regulations under Section 482, and the nearly identical statutory definition applied for purposes of Section 367(d) (providing for periodic income inclusions with respect to certain outbound transfers of intangibles), encompassed goodwill, going concern value, workforce-inplace, and similar elements that are not discrete items of intellectual property.
