Transfer Pricing in Guatemala

The legal framework

Guatemala's transfer pricing regime sits in a single chapter of a single statute. Book I of the Ley de Actualización Tributaria, Decreto 10-2012, carries the special valuation rules for related-party transactions at articles 54 to 67; Acuerdo Gubernativo 213-2013 develops them at articles 37 to 66. Article 54 states the arm's length principle in familiar terms: the price independent parties would have agreed for a comparable transaction under freely competitive conditions.

Two structural features shape everything else. Timing: the chapter was suspended by article 27 of Decreto 19-2013 and recovered force only on 1 January 2015, so obligations begin with fiscal year 2015. Reach: article 57 applies the rules only where a Guatemalan resident transacts with a related party resident abroad, and there is no de minimis, turnover or transaction-value threshold. Domestic intercompany dealings fall outside the statutory regime; a single quetzal of cross-border related-party trade brings a taxpayer fully into scope.

Relatedness rests on a 25 per cent test in article 56: direction or control, a direct or indirect 25 per cent holding of capital or votes, five or fewer persons controlling both parties, or common business-group membership. Article 56 also deems relatedness between a resident and its exclusive foreign distributor or agent, and between a permanent establishment and the rest of its own enterprise, so arrangements carrying no equity link are caught.

The OECD Guidelines have no binding force here. Guatemala is not an OECD member, neither the law nor the regulation incorporates them, and their only domestic recognition is as a listed technical reference in SAT's 2016 Guía Técnica. Cite them persuasively, never as authority.

Methods, comparables and benchmarking

This is where Guatemala departs most sharply from OECD orthodoxy, and where the OECD's own country profile misleads. The profile records a most-appropriate-method rule with no hierarchy; article 59 says otherwise. It sets two tiers: comparable uncontrolled price, cost plus and resale price first; profit split and the transactional net margin method only where the complexity of the transactions or the absence of information prevents proper application of a first-tier method. Article 50 of the regulation provides that this order must always be observed. A TNMM study must therefore open with an evidenced explanation of why no first-tier method could be applied; studies treating TNMM as the default are the easiest adjustments SAT makes.

Article 60 adds a sixth method for goods traded with related parties. Imports may not be priced above the international parameter price at the place of origin on the purchase date. Exports are priced off the international quotation at the last day of shipment unless the taxpayer proves the deal closed earlier, and the only admissible alternative is the contract date, which counts only if the contract reached SAT within three business days of signature. Miss that window and the shipment-date price governs.

On ranges, article 47 of the regulation accepts the interquartile range between the 25th and 75th percentiles; a result outside it is adjusted to the most appropriate point, ordinarily the median, unless fresh evidence places the taxpayer inside a range built on a reliable comparable uncontrolled price. Domestic and foreign, internal and external comparables are all permitted under article 39, and with no public database of Guatemalan accounts, regional Latin American sets are the norm. The Guía Técnica is unusually prescriptive about evidencing the search: screenshots of each sequential filter, the search date, and both an acceptance and a rejection matrix naming every discarded company. Capital adjustments must follow the formulas in Anexo 4 to the Guía Técnica, which restate the comparable's sales, costs and operating expenses for receivables, payables, inventory and net property, plant and equipment at a single interest rate; departing from them demands objective proof that the alternative is technically more reasonable.

Documentation: what SAT expects

Guatemala has a one-document model. Article 65 of the regulation requires the information demanded by articles 65, 66 and 67 of the law to sit in a single report, the Estudio de Precios de Transferencia. Calling Guatemala a two-tier or three-tier documentation jurisdiction is wrong, even though the prescribed content maps onto both OECD tiers: article 66 covers group structure, functions and risks, intangible ownership, pricing policy and service contracts, article 67 the taxpayer's own transactions, method selection, comparability analysis and the range applied.

The study is not filed. Article 65 numeral 1 requires it to exist when the income tax return is filed, which for a calendar-year taxpayer means 31 March; numeral 2 gives twenty days from a written SAT request to produce it. Since article 8 of the Código Tributario computes statutory periods in business days unless stated otherwise, treat that as twenty business days. Submission in practice is through Agencia Virtual, under Servicios de Fiscalización > Precios de Transferencia, although the 2016 Guía Técnica still formally prescribes delivery on a non-rewritable CD in PDF-text format and has never been repealed. Everything must be in Spanish.

The annual obligation is the annex. Article 64 of the regulation requires taxpayers reporting foreign related-party transactions to attach it to the annual return, due 31 March. It is completed inside Agencia Virtual, not on a paper form, and the underlying return is form SAT-1411, the annual income tax declaration, which migrated from Declaraguate to Agencia Virtual in 2026; SAT-1361 is the quarterly return, and SAT-1371 is not the annual return. Its six sections run from taxpayer and group data to a transaction schedule demanding, method by method, the profit level indicator, adjusted and unadjusted results, the quartiles, the arm's length conclusion, and for each comparable its identity, country, source URL and database. There is no country-by-country report, no master file and no monetary threshold anywhere in the regime.

Audits, penalties and the enforcement climate

There is no bespoke transfer pricing penalty, which flatters the regime until the numbers are read. An adjustment producing underpaid tax is simply omission of tax under articles 88 and 89 of the Código Tributario, penalised at 100 per cent of the tax omitted plus compensatory interest. Failure to file the annex or produce information falls under article 94 numeral 13: Q5,000 for the first breach, Q10,000 for the second, and thereafter Q10,000 plus one per cent of gross income in the last month with declared income, on each breach.

Holding a compliant study confers no penalty protection. Guatemala offers behavioural discounting instead: article 94 'A' cuts a formal-duty fine by 85 per cent for voluntary correction before any request or audit; article 145 'A' allows pre-audience settlement with interest reduced by 40 per cent and penalties by 80 per cent if paid within five days; article 146 reduces sanctions to 25 per cent where adjustments are accepted at the audiencia. Model those percentages at the outset, because the economics of settling versus litigating are decided early.

Enforcement has matured faster than the legislation. Through fiscal year 2024 SAT had determined more than USD 800 million of transfer pricing adjustments, working from risk-based sector models that flag below-average profitability and recurring losses. The annex platform now runs automated cross-field validations against the study, contracts and returns, so internal inconsistency is itself a detection trigger, and SAT has begun probing domestic related-party transactions on economic-substance grounds despite their formal exclusion. Assessments must be raised within four years under article 47 of the Código Tributario, eight for unregistered taxpayers.

Dispute resolution and advance certainty

The options are narrow. Guatemala has no comprehensive double tax treaty in force, so there is no mutual agreement procedure, no bilateral or multilateral APA and no competent authority channel. The Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, approved by Decreto 09-2017, brings exchange of information and simultaneous examinations but no dispute resolution. Nor is there any corresponding-adjustment mechanism or secondary adjustment rule, so a Guatemalan primary adjustment produces economic double taxation with no unilateral relief.

That leaves the unilateral APA under article 63. A taxpayer may ask SAT to fix the valuation of related-party transactions before they occur; SAT may approve, reject or modify with consent. An approved agreement covers transactions after approval, may extend to the current period, and runs for no more than four subsequent periods; silence for thirty days counts as rejection. Articles 57 to 63 of the regulation demand a heavy evidential package, including critical assumptions, projections and three years of financials, plus an annual compliance report. No fee is prescribed, and no data on concluded APAs is published, so treat the route as available but untested.

Domestically the sequence is fixed: adjustments, an audiencia of 30 business days with a further 30 for evidence, determination, recurso de revocatoria within 10 business days to the Tribunal Administrativo Tributario y Aduanero, contencioso administrativo within 30 business days, casación, and amparo. The constitutional challenge to the regime partly succeeded: by Auto of 25 January 2013 in Expediente 208-2013 the Corte de Constitucionalidad provisionally suspended article 61, SAT's power to recharacterise a transaction by reference to economic substance, and consolidated texts still carry that suspension, so the power has been out of force since. The rest of the chapter stands, and article 60 remains in force after Expediente 2838-2020.

Pillar Two and what changes in 2026

Guatemala became the 148th member of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS on 12 January 2026, committing it to the four BEPS minimum standards. Actions 13 and 14 are the transfer pricing ones, and neither is implemented: there is no country-by-country reporting obligation, no local-filing rule, no notification duty and no EUR 750 million threshold in Guatemalan law, and no MAP without treaties. Any source stating a Guatemalan CbCR threshold is wrong as at August 2026. Expect legislation, and expect three-tier documentation to arrive with it.

There is no Pillar Two legislation and no top-up tax of any kind. The 25 per cent headline rate sits above the GloBE minimum, though the simplified regime taxing gross revenue at 5 to 7 per cent and free-zone incentives can produce low effective rates. Amount B has not been adopted and Guatemala is not a covered jurisdiction; the article 59 hierarchy leaves no room for a fixed return on baseline distribution.

Nearer term, SAT redesigned the annex for fiscal year 2025. New fields capture headcount, whether an adjustment was made with its amount and the return line, the identity of the tested party, the interquartile range per transaction and an explicit arm's length answer. The tested-party field is the significant one: it signals that SAT will accept, and scrutinise, foreign tested parties. SAT has also flagged reforms extending the rules to domestic transactions and cutting the related-party royalty cap from 5 per cent of gross income to 2 or 3 per cent.

How practitioners should respond

Respect the hierarchy. Every study should carry a documented rejection of comparable uncontrolled price, cost plus and resale price before it reaches TNMM, because that is the argument SAT runs and the one taxpayers most often lose.

Build the file for the twenty-business-day clock. Search screenshots, rejection matrices, the Anexo 4 capital adjustments worked through and reproducible, comparables' statements in Spanish and the underlying contracts should be assembled by 31 March, not scrambled together when a request lands.

Reconcile the annex to the study before filing. The platform validates across fields and against the return; a mismatch between the annex range, the adjustment reported and the study invites an assessment at 100 per cent of the tax omitted, with no documentation defence.

Price the absence of relief. With no MAP, no corresponding adjustment and no bilateral APA, a Guatemalan adjustment is economically final. Where exposure is real, the article 63 APA and the graduated reductions in articles 145 'A' and 146 are the only levers, and both work best used early.