On April 22, 2016, MFA submitted a comment letter to the OECD in response to the OECD’s consultation paper on treaty entitlements for investment funds. In our letter, we encouraged the OECD to permit (1) widely-held, regulated investment funds to obtain treaty benefits; and (2) non-widely held, regulated investment funds to obtain proportional treaty benefits, to the extent that investors in such funds would be eligible to receive treaty benefits if they had invested directly instead of through an investment fund. We noted that this framework would avoid imposing double taxation on investors in private investment funds, many of which are tax-exempt institutional investors, while addressing the OECD’s policy concerns regarding treaty shopping.
