alerie Amerkhail joined Economic Consulting Services, LLC in 1998, after almost twelve years of transfer pricing experience in Big 6 accounting firms, most recently as a partner at Coopers & Lybrand L.L.P.

Ms Amerkhail has worked closely on transfer pricing issues with international tax attorneys from many of the leading U.S. law firms.  She has participated in negotiations involving all stages of IRS field examinations, appeals, and Advanced Pricing Agreement (“APA”) procedures.  Her economic reports have been used for all stages of transfer pricing planning and documentation, for the defense of transfer prices during examinations by both IRS and foreign tax authorities, and for dispute resolution, including appeals, competent authority, and APA negotiations. 

Transfer pricing documentation reports produced under Ms Amerkhail’s supervision have covered both inbound and outbound distributors of a wide range of consumer and industrial products, providers of many different types of services, and transfers of a variety of intangibles.  Ms Amerkhail successfully defended the first of these reports to come under examination by persuading the IRS field team to accept the report's definition of the scope of the controlled transactions, selection of the best method, choice of comparables, and adjustments to comparables, leaving only a small adjustment for the client's allocation of expenses between the controlled and uncontrolled transactions.  A documentation report for another client was the substantive basis for an IRS economist’s “no change” recommendation, despite a history of contentious audits and large proposed adjustments in previous examination cycles.

In several cases, Ms Amerkhail’s reports have provided the basis for the successful defense of transfer prices in examinations by the IRS or non-U.S. tax authorities.  For instance, the Japanese NTA recently accepted her annual report determining the arm’s length range of operating margins for non-U.S. distribution subsidiaries of the U.S. multinational as the appropriate test of transfer prices for the Japanese subsidiary.  In other cases, Ms Amerkhail’s reports contributed to successful competent authority proceedings.  For instance, in one case she prepared an economic report rebutting the IRS economist's analysis of the arm's length margin for a controlled distributor operating in a concentrated industry, and identified and analyzed CUP and profit split data that were used to convince the IRS that the taxpayer should be distinguished from other controlled distributors in its industry.  The successful competent authority settlement significantly reduced the tax adjustment imposed by the IRS, and resulted in a full refund of the additional tax from the foreign tax authority.

In preparing APA requests, Ms Amerkhail has worked closely with clients and their attorneys to develop transfer pricing methodologies that will be appropriate from a business perspective as well as acceptable to tax authorities.  In negotiations with the IRS, whether for APAs or at the examination or appeals levels, she has been involved in all stages of the negotiations, either cooperating with the IRS economist to reach conclusions acceptable to both sides, or demonstrating the unreasonableness of the IRS economist’s positions for the benefit of the rest of the IRS team.

Before specializing in transfer pricing, Ms Amerkhail served as a Principal Analyst for the Congressional Budget Office.  In that role, she forecast corporate tax receipts for CBO's official budget projections during the 1982‑86 period, when both economic conditions and tax law were unusually volatile.

Ms Amerkhail performed the first economic analysis of the potential impact of the 1981 individual income tax reductions on the distribution of after‑tax income, and the tax burden by income class, as a consultant to the Joint Economic Committee.  The conclusions were subsequently confirmed by after‑the‑fact studies.

As a Senior Economist at Chase Econometrics, she was responsible for Chase’s monthly forecasts of government income and outlays, and produced frequent reports on the economic impacts of government policies.  As an Economic Analyst at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, she used the major econometric models to analyze the potential impacts of proposed legislation, and produced reports for Congress on economic issues.

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Transfer Pricing Publications

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