Transfer Pricing in Moldova

The legal framework

Moldova's transfer pricing regime is young enough that most practitioners learned it in the same year their clients did. Chapter 11-2 of Title V of the Tax Code (Law no. 1163/1997), inserted by Law no. 356 of 29 December 2022 and running from article 226-16, took effect on 1 January 2024. Since then it has acquired a documentation obligation, an advance pricing agreement programme, a master file, and two rounds of amendment that changed what taxpayers file, when they file it, and how the State Tax Service tests it.

Administration and policy sit in different buildings. The State Tax Service (Serviciul Fiscal de Stat, SFS) is the single revenue body and runs every stage of enforcement. Rule-making belongs to the Ministry of Finance: article 226-19(8) delegates the form and content of both the transfer pricing information and the transfer pricing file, and MF Order no. 9/2024, in force 9 February 2024, carries the substantive Transfer Pricing Regulation, the information return and the APA form. That Regulation has since been amended twice, by MF Order no. 21 of 11 March 2025 and MF Order no. 8 of 15 January 2026, and both rounds cut more than they added. Point numbering has moved with them, so nothing should be cited from a pre-2025 copy.

The arm's length principle is statutory. Affiliation turns on a 25% voting-share test, second-degree family relationships, or effective control, meaning the ability to appoint or remove a majority of the board, executive body or auditors, or to direct decisions by contract, statute or voting agreement. Permanent establishments are affiliated persons. Point 2 of the Regulation, as re-enacted in March 2025, puts within scope Moldovan legal persons and individuals carrying on registered entrepreneurial activity, together with foreign legal persons holding a Moldovan branch or permanent representation. The chapter reaches all cross-border dealings and a narrowed class of local transactions: after Law 214/2024, resident-to-resident transactions are caught only where one or both parties are resident in a free economic zone or an IT park, or where the parties apply different tax rates and/or have a different corporate income tax base. The OECD Guidelines are not enacted but must be taken into account, and the statutory method list closes with any other method they recognise. There is no OECD transfer pricing country profile for Moldova, so the Tax Code and the Regulation are the whole of the primary material.

Methods, comparables and benchmarking

Five named methods are available, comparable uncontrolled price, resale price, cost plus, transactional net margin and profit split, plus any other method recognised in the OECD Guidelines. There is no hierarchy. Article 226-20(5) supplies the most-appropriate-method criteria, and where resale price, cost plus or TNMM is used the file must identify the tested party and justify that selection.

Moldova applies a strict full interquartile range: the lower quartile is the value below which the lowest quarter of observations fall, the upper quartile the value above which the highest quarter fall, and point 24 makes those points the minimum and maximum of the arm's length range. A result inside is compliant; outside it, adjustment follows. Where only two comparables survive the search, the range is the interval between them and the median is their arithmetic mean, which matters whenever a Moldovan screen collapses to a handful of companies.

The geographic rule is local-first. Point 12 of MF Order no. 9/2024, as re-enacted by MF Order no. 21 of 11 March 2025, requires the comparability analysis to take account of the economic circumstances and the geographic criterion of the market in which the affiliated parties carry on their transactions, and makes that geographic zone the priority. Point 13 is the separate rule that puts the burden on a taxpayer choosing a different geographic market to prove that choice. Pan-European sets remain usable, but only behind a documented rejection of Moldovan comparables, a step regional templates routinely omit.

Comparability follows the familiar frame of characteristics, functions, contractual terms, economic circumstances and business strategies, with risk tested against control and financial capacity and conduct prevailing over the contract. Beneath all of it there used to sit a real carve-out: as originally enacted, where aggregate transactions with affiliated persons did not exceed MDL 1,000,000 net of VAT in the period, arm's length compliance was not verified at all. That figure no longer appears anywhere in the consolidated Regulation, whose Chapter VI on arm's length verification was largely repealed by MF Orders 21/2025 and 8/2026. Treat the de minimis as historic unless a surviving provision can be pointed to.

Documentation: what the State Tax Service expects

From fiscal period 2025 there is a single threshold. A taxpayer whose transactions with affiliated persons total MDL 20,000,000 or more in the fiscal period, summed across all affiliated persons and net of VAT, must prepare the transfer pricing information and, on request, the transfer pricing file. The computation counts both revenues and expenses recognised in the accounts and excludes advances, foreign exchange differences and revaluation differences; for leasing, credit and loan arrangements only accrued interest counts.

The information is a stand-alone return, not a schedule to the profits tax return, due on the 25th day of the sixth month after the fiscal period ends, so 25 June 2026 for FY2025. Older guidance, including some SFS-derived pages, still cites the third month; that governed FY2024 only, whose deadline fell on 25 March 2025. Since May 2026 filing is exclusively electronic, through the SIA "Declarația electronică" cabinet. The information is a correctable return under article 188; the file is not, and instead carries its own right of correction within 30 days of the SFS communicating a decision adjusting or estimating transfer prices.

The file is never lodged annually. It must exist and be produced within 120 calendar days of an SFS request, and never before the information deadline. MF Order no. 8/2026, in force 23 January 2026, added the master file and local file architecture from fiscal period 2025. The local file is unusually prescriptive: affiliation relationships and their changes, each controlled transaction, intra-group services with cost allocation, business restructurings, intangibles including R&D, all contracts, functional and comparability analysis of taxpayer and tested party, search methodology and sources, the range computation and any comparability adjustments. It must be in Romanian, though supporting documents in English or Russian are accepted untranslated. Moldova imposes no country-by-country reporting and has not signed the CbC exchange agreement.

Audits, penalties and the enforcement climate

Moldova's enforcement architecture used to have a gateway, and a great deal of secondary commentary still describes it. It has gone. The preliminary verification — a desk review producing a draft report, with 30 days for the taxpayer to object with evidence, 30 days for the SFS to report, a month to adjust voluntarily, notification within ten working days, immunity from audit for transactions adjusted at that stage, and suspension of any audit in which controlled transactions surfaced — sat in Chapter VI of the Regulation. Point 30 was repealed by MF Order no. 21 of 11 March 2025, and points 32 to 35 and 38 to 46 by MF Order no. 8 of 15 January 2026, in force 23 January 2026. Amended point 31 now says only that controlled transactions are examined by thematic tax audit under Chapter 11 of Title V, and new point 37 confirms that failure to produce documents, information, explanations or the file does not prevent the audit proceeding. The Tax Code never contained a preliminary verification at all. Only vestigial references survive, at point 54 and in point 55(2), which still cross-refers to the repealed point 43. There is no gateway, no 30/30/one-month sequence and no audit shield.

What remains is the arithmetic, and it is now sharper. Point 47 requires an adjustment made in a tax audit to be made to the median of the comparability interval. A voluntary adjustment under point 27 may be made to any point between the minimum and the maximum of that interval, which point 24 fixes as the lower and upper quartile; the condition that it must not reduce declared income tax was deleted by MF Order no. 21/2025 and no longer applies. Point 28 closes the voluntary route once a transfer pricing audit has been initiated against either affiliate, and point 85 of the APA Regulation applies the median on an audit following revocation or annulment of an APA. For a company sitting just outside the range, the gap between the nearer quartile and the median is the whole of the exposure — and with the preliminary verification repealed, there is no longer a formal stage at which the SFS invites the taxpayer to close it.

Penalties sit in article 260: MDL 30,000 to 50,000 for late filing of the information or late production of the file, MDL 60,000 to 90,000 for inauthentic information, MDL 100,000 to 150,000 for failure to file, MDL 150,000 to 200,000 for a file containing inauthentic data, and reportedly MDL 300,000 to 500,000 for failure to produce the file. There is no documentation penalty protection, only the general 50% reduction under article 234(2) where assessed amounts are paid within three working days. Data-quality penalties are widely reported as biting only in audits of periods from 2028, a grace window whose perimeter is not settled. On limitation, article 264(1) gives four years from the last date set for filing the relevant return; article 264(3) allows the SFS to extend the period under audit to a maximum of six years from that date, but only where the return was not filed or the taxpayer is claiming restitution.

Dispute resolution and advance certainty

Advance pricing agreements arrived with Law no. 214 of 31 July 2024 and have been available since 1 January 2025. An APA is an SFS decision fixing the conditions and methodology for pricing specified controlled transactions over a defined period. Unilateral, bilateral and multilateral agreements are available, the last two only where a double tax treaty with the counterparty state is in force. Coverage runs to five fiscal periods including the year of application, with a two-period rollback for completed transactions. No APA is available for transactions already subject to a completed or ongoing arm's length audit, and renewal must be requested at least 60 days before expiry.

The economics are modest: MDL 30,000 for a unilateral agreement and MDL 50,000 for a bilateral or multilateral one, per transaction type, with a refund route if the foreign competent authority refuses or does not answer within six months. Processing runs six months for unilateral, twelve for bilateral and eighteen for multilateral agreements from admission, after an optional pre-filing discussion of up to 30 days.

Beyond the APA programme certainty is thin. There is no domestic MAP regulation and no published Moldovan MAP guidance; article 226-22(1) routes cross-border relief through the applicable double taxation convention. The SFS treaty table runs to 52 numbered rows but covers 50 distinct partner jurisdictions, because the Czech Republic and Kuwait each appear twice for convention and protocol, and it omits the France convention reported as in force since 2024 — so it is not itself fully current. Domestically the Regulation provides a resident corresponding adjustment: under point 54 an adjustment to one Moldovan affiliate is opposable to the other, and point 55 requires the decision to reach the unexamined affiliate within 15 working days. Article 226-22 then adds a cross-border route that does not run through MAP at all: a resident affiliate may apply to the SFS with evidence of the non-resident's arm's length adjustment, and the SFS must decide within 30 working days, confirming the adjustment, refusing it with reasons, or ordering an arm's length audit. Assessments are contested under articles 267 to 274, within 30 days of receipt, first before the issuing body and then in the administrative courts. No Moldovan transfer pricing judgment has been reported, which reflects how recently the first filings were made rather than any settled practice.

Pillar Two, Amount B and what changed in 2026

Moldova joined the Inclusive Framework on 28 May 2024 and endorsed the Two-Pillar Statement, but has legislated none of it. There is no income inclusion rule, no undertaxed profits rule and no qualified domestic minimum top-up tax; implementation trackers show no registration deadline, no return and no GloBE information return obligation, and Moldova has not signed the GIR exchange agreement. Groups with Moldovan subsidiaries should expect that entity to be a data source for someone else's top-up computation, not a filer.

Amount B is a subtler trap. Moldova is named in the OECD statement defining covered jurisdictions for the political commitment on Amount B, so other members undertake to respect an Amount B outcome Moldova applies. But Moldova has not adopted the simplified and streamlined approach domestically, and neither Chapter 11-2 nor the Regulation mentions it. Listing confers eligibility, not obligation; a distributor cannot invoke Amount B against the SFS on the strength of the list alone.

The 2026 domestic story is administrative, and larger than it first looks. Order no. 8/2026 bedded in the master file, tightened intangibles documentation and approved the APA application form — and repealed most of Chapter VI of the Regulation, taking the preliminary verification procedure with it. Enforcement remains early stage, with the 2024 and 2025 filings supplying the SFS its first datasets and no adjustment statistics published.

How practitioners should respond

Three priorities follow. First, re-baseline the calendar. Any compliance plan built on the original design, the MDL 50 million tier, mandatory annual filing of the file, the 60-day production window or the third-month deadline, describes law that Law no. 187/2025 removed with effect from fiscal period 2025. Stale secondary sources on this point are abundant, including some published through official channels.

Second, treat the file as an on-demand deliverable with a 120-day clock rather than an annual product. That sounds generous until a benchmarking search has to be run, a Moldovan comparable set screened and defensibly rejected, contracts gathered and everything rendered into Romanian. Groups relying on a regional master file should confirm it meets the Order 8/2026 content list and that the local file speaks to Moldovan comparability rather than a template's home market. Note too that the information and the file are corrected by different routes: article 188 for the information, a 30-day post-decision window for the file.

Third, model the median before anyone asks for it. An audit adjustment goes to the median; a voluntary adjustment can go to the nearer quartile, but only until a transfer pricing audit is initiated against either affiliate. With the preliminary verification repealed there is no report that puts the choice in front of the taxpayer, and no shield for transactions adjusted late — so the decision has to be taken on the taxpayer's own timetable, with the numbers in front of the client. And verify everything against the consolidated text on legis.md: article and point numbering has moved twice in two years, and the Regulation has now been amended twice by order.