Transfer pricing in Venezuela is governed entirely by domestic law — Articles 109 to 168 of the income tax decree-law, a paper PT-99 return each June, and penalties measured in days of closure as well as money.
The specialist function is the Transfer Pricing and Advance Agreements Unit inside SENIAT's Gerencia de Estudios Económicos Tributarios, created by Providencia SNAT/2002/914 (Gaceta Oficial 37.423, 15 April 2002).
Providencia SNAT/2002/914; SENIATTítulo VII, Capítulo III, in six sections: general provisions, related parties, rules common to the methods, the methods, advance pricing agreements and formal duties. The chapter is substantively unchanged since the 2007 reform but was renumbered: the related-party definition now in Article 114 was Article 116 under the earlier laws, which is how the Supreme Tribunal cites it in cases decided on pre-2015 years. Much online commentary conflates the two sets of numbers.
LISLR, Título VII Cap. III; LISLR 2015 compared with LISLR 2001/2007Article 111 imputes the profit difference to the fiscal year in which the controlled transactions occurred. There is no secondary adjustment — no deemed dividend, loan or repatriation follows a primary adjustment.
LISLR arts. 109–111Article 115 catches transactions routed through an unrelated interposed person who deals with a related party abroad; Article 117 presumes linkage with persons in low-tax jurisdictions. There is no domestic-to-domestic transfer pricing filing obligation.
LISLR arts. 114, 115, 117A renvoi to the current edition, not a frozen 1995 reference — but the domestic articles prevail on conflict. Venezuela is not an OECD member, is not among the 148 Inclusive Framework members and has no OECD transfer pricing country profile.
LISLR art. 113; OECD Inclusive Framework composition, 5 December 2025Average monthly debt is compared with average opening and closing equity; excess debt is treated as equity and the corresponding interest disallowed. There is no separate interest-rate safe harbour.
LISLR art. 116; PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, VenezuelaThe residual split allocates residual profit by reference to significant intangibles (Art. 138); TNMM may key on assets, sales, costs, expenses or cash flow (Art. 139). There is no commodity-specific rule.
LISLR arts. 134–139This is a priority rule, not a US-style best-method rule. Rejecting CUP has to be reasoned on the file rather than assumed away.
LISLR art. 140Providencia SNAT/2010/0090 (Gaceta Oficial 39.577, 20 December 2010) develops Article 131: order the observations, take the 25th to 75th percentiles, adjust to the median rather than the nearer edge. That makes a weak range expensive.
LISLR arts. 130–131; Providencia SNAT/2010/0090Economic circumstances under Article 127 are unusually detailed — market size, competitive position, regulation, transport costs, market level and timing. Article 129 requires transaction-by-transaction analysis and the unbundling of package deals.
LISLR arts. 121–129The analysis must address price controls, interest-rate and exchange controls, limits on management fees and royalties, subsidies, anti-dumping obligations and exchange-rate policy. This is the statutory hook for adjusting foreign comparables to Venezuelan conditions.
LISLR art. 133Nothing requires domestic comparables and the local market cannot supply them, so Latin American and North American database sets are the norm, adjusted under Articles 127 and 133. Tested-party convention is practice, not statute; there is no SENIAT guidance on comparable selection.
LISLR arts. 127, 132, 133; TPA Global country summaryVenezuela never adopted the BEPS Action 13 three-tiered package, so there are no OECD templates and no monetary documentation thresholds. The practical deliverable is a local study built to the statutory list, not to Chapter V of the OECD Guidelines.
LISLR art. 167Venezuela is outside the Inclusive Framework and has not signed the CbC Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement, so Venezuelan-headed groups should expect local-filing or surrogate demands in other jurisdictions.
OECD Inclusive Framework composition, 5 December 2025Fixed assets and depreciation, risks assumed, group chart and identification of each foreign related party with proof of linkage, functions and assets, financial and production cost statements, intercompany contracts, the method with its justification, comparables and adjustments, commercial and credit strategies, and whether counterparties are under audit abroad. Electronic records must be secured and immediately available.
LISLR art. 167; Moore Venezuela Boletín 158 (June 2026)Article 167 requires documentation duly translated into Spanish; retention runs with prescription under COT Article 155(3) read with Articles 55 and 56. A ten-year posture is the prudent default for cross-border files.
LISLR art. 167; COT 2020 arts. 55, 56, 155(3)Annexes A to E by principal activity, reporting each foreign related party, aggregate income and expenditure in historical bolívares and, in Annex A, a transaction-level breakdown with method and margin. Most practitioner guidance renders the deadline as six months from year end; the readings coincide for 31 December year-ends and diverge otherwise.
LISLR art. 166; Moore Venezuela Boletín 158 (June 2026)No de minimis for the PT-99 (the instructivo requires filing whatever the amount), no small-taxpayer exclusion, no simplified low-value-adding services regime and no advance-approval route other than the APA.
Moore Venezuela Boletín 158; LISLR arts. 116, 141–165The same sanction applies to a return filed more than a year late, and closure applies to every establishment or branch. The 2020 Tax Code replaced the tax unit with the exchange-rate multiple, so sources quoting "150 tax units" are right on the multiple and wrong on the unit.
COT 2020 art. 103(1)Separately, failing to file the informative return on investments in low-tax jurisdictions carries closure plus 2,000×, or 1,000× if merely late.
COT 2020 art. 103(3), (6), (7)Article 104(12) is the heaviest routine transfer pricing compliance penalty in the system, and it applies regardless of whether the pricing itself was correct.
COT 2020 art. 104(12)Most multinational subsidiaries are designated sujetos pasivos especiales, so the working figures become 450× for a missing PT-99, 300× for a late or incomplete one and 3,000× for missing documentation — on top of the closure.
COT 2020 art. 108, second paragraphLate-payment interest runs in addition. There is no documentation-based penalty protection: the consolidated text of Article 169 LISLR still carries an exclusion for assessments based exclusively on the taxpayer's own return data, but the 2015 explanatory memorandum announced the removal of those exclusions, so the exclusion cannot be relied on.
COT 2020 arts. 112, 195, 196; LISLR art. 169Ten years applies where returns were not filed, records were not kept, or the taxable events concern acts performed or assets located abroad (Article 56) — which covers most transfer pricing files. Time runs from 1 January of the following year.
COT 2020 arts. 55, 56, 59COT Articles 250–259 and LISLR Articles 141–165. A preliminary filing under Article 143 gives SENIAT 30 business days to explain the procedure; Article 144 sets the dossier; a non-statutory method may be agreed if internationally accepted; Article 163 puts the analysis costs on the taxpayer.
COT 2020 arts. 250–253, 258; LISLR arts. 141–148, 154, 163Longer terms are possible only where the APA derives from a treaty mutual agreement. Decisions to approve, reject, modify or cancel are not appealable, and SENIAT may void the agreement for fraud or cancel it for breach.
LISLR arts. 151, 153, 162, 165; COT 2020 arts. 254–257The treaty network is wide (Spain, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States, China, Germany, Brazil among others). COT Articles 272 and 286 exclude competent-authority acts from both domestic appeal routes, so a MAP outcome cannot be litigated locally; Article 112 LISLR allows a corresponding adjustment by substitute return.
COT 2020 arts. 272, 286; LISLR art. 112; PwC treaty listBoth extended periods are transfer-pricing specific (COT Articles 198 and 202) and the Acta lapses if the resolution is late. Thereafter 25 business days for the recurso jerárquico, or a direct contencioso tributario appeal, with onward appeal to the Sala Político-Administrativa.
COT 2020 arts. 194, 195, 198, 202, 272–274, 286Designation falls within 15 business days of the Article 195 deadline, access runs to 20 business days after the closing resolution, and one replacement is allowed. Otherwise third-party identities may be disclosed only to the court hearing an appeal (Article 136).
COT 2020 arts. 136, 198Sala Político-Administrativa No. 00087 (3 March 2020, Olalde) annulled the whole penalty resolution because the company's president and majority shareholder sat on the US manufacturer Nulab Incorporated's Junta de Consultores as an external scientific adviser on formulations — an advisory role, not a directorship — which was not participation in the dirección, control o capital of either company under Article 116 of the 2001 law; Nulab's majority shareholders were Hakan and Gabriela Johansson, and the 1,740 UT of formal penalties had already been reduced to 1,070 UT by the concurrence rule. No. 00389 (13 June 2024, Zara Venezuela) declared the appeal sin lugar, leaving a permanent 6.78% uplift on CIF customs value firme against the taxpayer's transfer pricing evidence, with costs awarded against it.
TSJ SPA sentencias 00087/2020 and 00389/2024; COT 2001 art. 81Venezuela has not joined the two-pillar statement or signed the multilateral instrument. In-scope groups face top-up tax elsewhere with nothing domestic to absorb it, though income tax rates — 34% at the top of Tarifa 2, a flat 40% on banking, financial, insurance and reinsurance income, 50% on hydrocarbons and connected activities and 60% on mining royalties and analogous participations — mean many Venezuelan entities test above 15%.
OECD Inclusive Framework composition; LISLR arts. 11, 12, 52, 53; Grant Thornton, Hacer Negocios en Venezuela 2026Baseline marketing and distribution continues to be tested under the ordinary Article 134 and 140 hierarchy with a mandatory interquartile range.
OECD Inclusive Framework composition; LISLR arts. 134, 140The governing texts remain the 2015 income tax law, the 2020 Tax Code and Providencia SNAT/2010/0090. Moore Venezuela's June 2026 bulletin restates the regime unchanged and confirms paper-only PT-99 filing.
Moore Venezuela Boletín 158 (June 2026)SENIAT's homologated electronic invoicing and real-time data transmission programme through 2025–2026 gives it transaction-level visibility over intercompany flows. Advisers report inspections reopening in 2026, concentrated on special taxpayers.
Grant Thornton Venezuela 2026; Grupo Consultor EFE; DeloitteVenezuela regulates transfer pricing entirely through domestic law. The operative text is Título VII, Capítulo III of the income tax law — Articles 109 to 168 of Decreto 2.163, published in Gaceta Oficial 6.210 Extraordinario of 30 December 2015 — administered by the Servicio Nacional Integrado de Administración Aduanera y Tributaria (SENIAT), whose specialist function is the Transfer Pricing and Advance Agreements Unit created by Providencia SNAT/2002/914.
The substance of the chapter has not moved since the 2007 reform; the 2015 decree consolidated and renumbered it, which is the first trap for anyone reading older material. The related-party definition now in Article 114 was Article 116 under the 2001 and 2007 laws, and much of the available commentary — including the Supreme Tribunal's own reasoning in cases decided on earlier years — still cites the old numbers.
Article 109 requires related-party dealings to be priced as independent parties would have agreed in comparable circumstances; Article 110 makes that methodology mandatory for the costing and deductibility of imported goods, services and rights; and Article 111 brings into charge, in the year the transactions occurred, profits that would have accrued but for the controlled conditions. Article 114 defines linkage by participation in management, control or capital, Article 115 catches dealings routed through an unrelated interposed person, and Article 117 presumes that transactions with persons in low-tax jurisdictions are related-party transactions. There is no domestic-to-domestic filing duty.
Article 113 gives the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines supplementary force of law for anything the decree-law does not cover, so far as they are consistent with it and with Venezuela's treaties — a renvoi to the current edition rather than a frozen 1995 reference. But Venezuela is not an OECD member, is not among the 148 Inclusive Framework jurisdictions, and none of the BEPS minimum standards apply to it.
Article 134 lists five methods: comparable uncontrolled price (135), resale price (136), cost plus (137), profit split including a residual split keyed to significant intangibles (138), and the transactional net margin method (139). Article 140 imposes a hierarchy rather than a best-method rule — CUP must be considered first, and SENIAT then assesses whether the method actually applied suits the transaction and the economic activity.
Comparability runs through Articles 121 to 128 — characteristics of the transaction, functions with assets and risks, contractual terms, economic circumstances and business strategies — with Article 126 requiring written terms to be tested against actual conduct. Article 129 requires transaction-by-transaction treatment, permits aggregation only where dealings are so linked or continuous that separate valuation is impossible, and requires package deals to be unbundled and priced individually.
Article 133 obliges the analysis to deal with distortions produced by state intervention — price controls, interest-rate and exchange controls, restrictions on management charges and royalties, sector subsidies, anti-dumping obligations and exchange-rate policy. It is the statutory hook for adjusting foreign data to local conditions.
Ranges are governed by Articles 130 and 131 and by Providencia SNAT/2010/0090 (Gaceta Oficial 39.577, 20 December 2010): the interquartile range is mandatory, and a taxpayer falling outside it is adjusted to the median rather than to the nearer quartile. Because local comparables barely exist, practice draws on Latin American and North American company sets, uses prior-year data as Article 132 permits, and treats the Venezuelan entity as the less complex tested party. No SENIAT guidance on comparable selection exists.
Venezuela never adopted the Action 13 package. There is no master file, no OECD-format local file, no country-by-country report, no notification and no monetary threshold of any kind. Standing outside the Inclusive Framework, Venezuela has no qualifying competent authority agreement for exchange, so Venezuelan-headed groups with foreign subsidiaries should expect local-filing or surrogate-parent demands abroad.
What exists instead is Article 167, a single open-ended duty to keep the documentation and information used to calculate the prices reported: fixed assets and depreciation, risks assumed, the group chart with each foreign related party identified and the linkage evidenced, functions and assets, financial and production cost statements, intercompany contracts, the method with its justification, comparables and adjustments, commercial and credit strategies, and whether the foreign counterparties are themselves under transfer pricing audit abroad. Electronic records must be secured and immediately available to SENIAT.
Documentation must be in Spanish where translation is needed, and kept for as long as the tax is not time-barred under COT Article 155(3) — six years, ten in the extended cases, which makes a ten-year posture the sensible default. The annual disclosure is separate: Forma PT-99, with Annexes A to E by principal activity, due under Article 166 in the June following the year end, still lodged on paper in five signed and stamped copies at the taxpayer's regional office.
Enforcement is driven by formal offences. The 2020 Tax Code (Gaceta Oficial 6.507 Extraordinario, 29 January 2020) abolished the tax unit as the penalty benchmark in favour of multiples of the official exchange rate of the highest-value currency published by the Banco Central de Venezuela. Failing to file the PT-99, or filing more than a year late, brings ten continuous days' closure of every establishment plus 150 times that rate under Article 103(1); a late or incomplete return costs 100 times, the wrong form or place 50 times; and failing to keep the transfer pricing documentation brings closure plus 1,000 times under Article 104(12). Article 108 increases each of those figures by 200% for designated special taxpayers, so the working numbers are 450, 300 and 3,000 times.
Closure, not the fine, is the sanction that hurts, and the largest routine exposure is the inability to produce the study on demand. There is no statutory number of days to produce it; the deadline is set in each Acta de Requerimiento.
On the adjustment itself, COT Article 112 sanctions understated tax at 100% to 300% plus late-payment interest, falling to 30% where the taxpayer accepts the Acta de Reparo and pays within the fifteen business days of Article 195. Venezuela has no documentation-based penalty protection. The consolidated text of Article 169 of the income tax law still carries an exclusion where the assessment rests exclusively on the taxpayer's own return data, but the 2015 explanatory memorandum announced the removal of those exclusions, so the exclusion cannot be relied on. Assessment powers prescribe in six years, extended to ten where the taxable events concern acts performed or assets located abroad — which in practice makes ten the outer limit on any cross-border file.
Venezuela has a statutory APA programme resting on two overlapping sets of rules: COT Articles 250 to 259 and income tax law Articles 141 to 165. Any income taxpayer, and a non-resident planning to operate through a permanent establishment or related entity, may propose the valuation of identified future transactions. There is no threshold and no fee, though Article 163 puts the cost of the analysis on the applicant. A preliminary filing under Article 143 triggers 30 business days for SENIAT to set out the procedure; Article 144 fixes the dossier. SENIAT has twelve months to decide, and silence counts as rejection.
Mutual agreement exists only through the treaty network — Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Germany, Brazil and some thirty other partners — with no domestic MAP guidance, no published statistics and no Action 14 peer review. COT Articles 272 and 286 exclude competent-authority acts from both the administrative and the judicial appeal routes, so a MAP outcome cannot be relitigated at home. Article 112 of the income tax law permits a corresponding adjustment by substitute return where a treaty partner has adjusted and SENIAT accepts.
The domestic timetable is generous: fifteen business days to accept the Acta, then a special five-month period for written defences under Article 198 and two years for SENIAT to issue the closing resolution under Article 202, failing which the Acta lapses. Article 198 also lets the taxpayer appoint two representatives to inspect the third-party comparable information SENIAT relied on. The Sala Político-Administrativa has yet to decide a substantive dispute on method, comparables or range: its 2020 Olalde judgment annulled a penalty resolution on the ground that an advisory seat on a US supplier's Junta de Consultores was not participation in management, control or capital, and its 2024 Zara judgment dismissed the appeal outright.
Venezuela has no Pillar Two measure of any kind — no income inclusion rule, no UTPR and no qualified domestic minimum top-up tax. It has not joined the October 2021 two-pillar statement or signed the multilateral instrument. A Venezuelan subsidiary is therefore low-tax tested under other jurisdictions' rules with no domestic top-up tax to absorb the charge, although income tax rates — 34% at the top of the ordinary Tarifa 2, a flat 40% on banking, financial, insurance and reinsurance income, 50% on hydrocarbons and connected activities and 60% on mining royalties — mean many will test above 15% in any event.
Amount B is likewise absent. Venezuela is not a covered jurisdiction, and baseline distributors continue to be benchmarked under the Article 134 and 140 hierarchy with a mandatory interquartile range.
What is moving is administrative rather than legislative. The penalty benchmark has shifted from tax units to the exchange-rate multiple; the special-taxpayer population is widening, which switches on both the 200% penalty uplift and the 1% monthly income tax advance; and SENIAT's mandatory homologated electronic invoicing and real-time data transmission programme is giving the administration transaction-level sight of intercompany flows. Local advisers report inspections reopening in 2026, concentrated on special taxpayers.
Three things follow for anyone running a Venezuelan file. First, build the study to Article 167, not to Chapter V. A group local file template will not answer the fixed-asset schedule, the production cost statement or the question whether the foreign counterparties are under audit abroad — and the sanction for a missing document is closure plus 3,000 times the exchange-rate multiple for a special taxpayer, whatever the pricing conclusion turns out to be.
Second, treat the PT-99 as a logistics exercise rather than a filing. It is paper, five signed copies, lodged in person at the correct regional office, and a substitute return means refiling everything. Diarise it separately from the income tax return, and settle the deadline question early: the statute says the June following year end, most practitioner guidance says six months, and for non-calendar year-ends the two readings genuinely diverge.
Third, make Article 133 earn its place. A comparable set drawn from Latin America or the United States is defensible only if the study identifies the exchange, price and payment controls that separate those markets from Venezuela's and records the adjustments made for them. Because the consequence of a failed range is adjustment to the median rather than to the nearer quartile, the cost of a thin benchmarking section is asymmetric.
Where the exposure is material and prospective, the APA deserves pricing out on its merits: four covered years, no rollback to open periods, costs borne by the applicant, twelve months of silence counting as refusal, and no appeal if the answer is no.
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