Tax & Legal

The right to tax carried interest (i.e. the additional share of profits disproportionate to the capital invested) is vested in the country of residence either under Art. 21(1) Double Tax Agreement-USA (“DTA-USA”) (Other Income) or under Art. 13(5) DTA-USA (Capital Gains) if the corresponding income constitutes income from asset management and not income from business activities. In a recent decision, the Schleswig-Holstein Tax Court ruled on the treaty qualification of the carried interest received by a German resident shareholder (the intervenor) of a limited liability company established under the law of the US state of Delaware with its registered office and place of management in the US (the claimant).

The loss forfeiture rules of Section 8c of the Corporation Tax Act in the version valid for 2014 are not applicable to deductible losses which are allocated to a corporation as partner of a limited partnership pursuant to Section 15a Income Tax Act. With this decision, the Supreme Tax Court contradicts the view of the tax administration.

In its ruling of 21 February 2022 (I R 13/19), the Supreme Tax Court rejected the tax office's appeal against the ruling of the Lower Saxony Tax and ruled that the (retroactive) change of legal form of a partnership into a corporation under Section 25 Sentence 1 in conjunction with Section§ Section 20 (1) Reorganisations Tax Act is prohibited for tax purposes if, at the time of the resolution to convert, the partnership changing its legal form no longer engages in a commercial activity

For income tax purposes, income of a partnership from leasing and letting or from capital assets is to be reclassified as trading income where the partnership also receives a negligible amount of income from a participation in a trading partnership; however, such “tainted” income is not subject to trade tax.

The Supreme Tax Court has held that the German partners in a US LLP law firm should tax their partnership earnings in the country where they carried out their practice.

The Supreme Tax Court has held that the treaty attribution of the royalty income charged by a US partner is to his US business. Accordingly, it is not taxable in Germany as partnership profits.