 St. Lucia's Inland Revenue Department, IRD, and CARICUM, in association with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, and the World Bank Group, conducted a four-day regional trading workshop on foundational transfer pricing. The trading workshop brought together technical tax administration and ministry of finance officials from the Caribbean to learn the underlying transfer pricing principles and discuss potential legislative and administrative considerations to address transfer pricing. Tax advisor with the OECD and workshop facilitator Diego Gonzalez remarked that transfer pricing tackles tax evasion. He added that countries who implemented the measure noticed evasion levels reduce and collection levels increase. What most potential companies do is tax evasion, tax avoidance, you know, and avoidance is just making sure that they can move, you know, around the gaps that legislation has in different jurisdictions for their benefit. So they're not doing anything illegal, but of course it's hitting really hard, you know, the coffins of the developing countries. The knowledge sharing and case studies from this workshop aims to build the capacity of regional and local participants to identify and close gaps in existing legislation and help formulate new transfer pricing legislation. The other Inland Revenue Department, Marcia Viti, says this training will build on prior knowledge to ultimately improve tax collection. We have no specific legislation to deal with transfer pricing, however, our Income Tax Act does have an element of it and therefore it is being practiced already. We want to delve deeper into it to have some more understanding because you would understand that there would be new staff coming on and persons have to continue that regime of understanding different aspects of taxation, transfer pricing being one very important aspect. In endorsing the workshop, Permanent Secretary in the Department of Finance, Francis Fontenelle, says that though transfer pricing in itself is not a bad practice, it can however be used inappropriately, especially with the collection of taxes. Saint Lucia and many of the jurisdictions represented here today have a significant number of companies that are part of conglomerates which have multinational companies. As such, there is hope for the use of transfer pricing to inappropriately influence profits declared whether it be in Saint Lucia, in your jurisdiction or otherwise. These transfer pricing risks remain and there is need to not only build capacity but also an appropriate compliance framework in an ever-evolving transfer pricing environment. Francis added that a more robust transfer pricing framework coupled with enhanced capacity building exercises will lead to greater synchronization of transfer pricing policy. This, he said, should ultimately lead to higher tax compliance and tax revenues. This is really a way to raise revenues and get the right amount in your country. Sabine Will from the World Bank Group was the other tax consultant facilitating the workshop. The foundational transfer pricing workshop for the Caribbean was held at the Finance Administrative Center in Point Seraphine from Tuesday 13th to 16th June 2023. Under National Competitiveness and Productivity Council, Glenn Simon reporting.