The first six months of 2010 in the international transfer pricing market has seen a significant rise in recruitment activity across all industry sectors.

Transfer pricing in the post global financial crisis environment continues to be one of the most important issues facing multinational companies, largely because tax authorities around the world are seeking to recoup tax revenues that may have leaked out of their respective tax systems since the latter part of 2008. This is not to say that tax leakage has been due to inappropriate transfer pricing practices; however given the substantial increase in international trade and globalisation over the past 10-15 years, the focus on transfer pricing and appropriate corporate behaviour with respect to it, has certainly sharpened. Post the financial crisis, not surprisingly, the financial services sector is being actively targeted in terms of investigations, resulting in subsequent litigation, settlements and adjustments. This been greatly impactful on in-house recruitment and as a result, TP International has recently placed several senior candidates into banking and financial services related roles. We see this trend continuing as scrutiny of the financial services sector continues.

TP International’s reputation as the only global specialist in the recruitment of transfer pricing professionals ensures that we have a transparent view in all the major markets with respect to Transfer Pricing recruitment. Recent trends include the increase of senior transfer pricing hires into global multinational companies. Multinational companies (MNCs) are realising that because of the tremendous workload (both compliance and advisory), it does not necessarily make sense to outsource all transfer pricing work to external advisers.

Cost effectiveness and adequate management of global transfer pricing issues and responsibilities are key. With transfer pricing now firmly entrenched in most MNC’s risk management strategy and boardroom discussions; it has become important that MNCs have a consistent permanent and internal resource who can adequately deal with the global or regional management of transfer pricing risk. Tax teams have been in place within MNCs for over 20 years therefore it makes commercial sense that an area as specialised as transfer pricing, has representation within the risk management framework of MNCs.

Once the decision has been made to bring a specialist transfer pricing resource on board, the questions then become: Who do we bring in? What level of seniority should they be? What type of experience would be appropriate? How do we find these people? There are of course, many different answers to these questions. Some clients prefer to hire people with previous in-house transfer pricing experience; others prefer to hire people directly from transfer pricing consulting environments where their sector experience remains broad and less specialist.

As such, the key to a successful hire is grounded in identifying individuals with the right technical and commercial balance, interpersonal skills and multi-jurisdictional experience.