M1 - Business AdministrationReturn

Small and medium sized enterprises account for over 99% of all companies in Eu-ropean Union and have very important position in the EU economy in the area of growth and employment. However, they face great deal of obstacles, such as com-pliance costs of taxation, 28 different tax systems in Europe, difficult transfer pric-ing rules and so on. Further, compliance costs of taxation are regressive with regard to firm size and significantly higher in case of enterprises with foreign branch or subsidiary in comparison with enterprises which are not internationalized. Moreo-ver, compliance costs are increasing through strict and difficult transfer pricing rules among European countries. Therefore, taxes and new obligations should be carefully designed so that they can address the disproportionately high tax compli-ance burdens faced by those enterprises. Unfortunately, there does not exist a study determining compliance costs of transfer pricing issue in the literature. Therefore, the aim of paper is to determine compliance costs of transfer pricing issues in case of SMEs. The results are based on the questionnaire distributed among Czech parent companies having subsidiaries in Europe and Czech subsidiaries having a parent company in Europe. Based on the results we can conclude that costs for managing of transfer pricing requirements can reach from EUR 6,430 to 7,704 per year, time needed for this issue between 27 and 35 working days and in case of comparison with corporate tax collection it represents between 3.90 % and 12.74 %.

The objective of the article is to define rules for establishing a high quality costing system to measure the costs of products, customers, and other cost objects in a manufacturing enterprise. The pros and cons of all existing costing methods are discussed in the article, as are the methods themselves. Furthermore, their allocation principles are investigated, along with the nature of costs and the behavior of cost elements in major enterprises. One expectation is that different principles of cost allocation will have to be applied to different types of costs, based on their relation to the output of a company's processes. Initially, several analyses are performed in order to identify the methods that prove insufficient for effective and accurate cost allocation. These methods, despite their inaccuracies, are very frequently used in practice. Also, cost elements or cost pools inside an organization, which tend to be hard to allocate accurately, are identified. Secondly, several implementation projects on the activity-based costing system, have been analyzed in order to consider the effectiveness of utilizing such a system in a manufacturing enterprise. Furthermore, the general rules for allocating cost pools or activity costs are outlined. Thirdly, different principles for cost allocation are defined for individual cost elements. The result of the article is to define the rules for implementing a costing system which provides accurate and correct information. These rules should provide for a compromise between the use of a traditional absorption costing system and the activity-based costing system, by pointing out the most important allocation principles.