The Central Board of Direct Taxes, CBDT has signed 10 more unilateral advance pricing agreements (APAs) with Indian taxpayers to reduce litigation by providing certainty in transfer pricing.<br/><br/>The 10 APAs signed in the past one week pertain to sectors like telecom, pharma, banking and finance, steel, retail and information technology. According to the Finance Ministry, Two of these 10 agreements are Bilateral APAs with the United Kingdom and Japan. Seven of these agreements have rollback provisions in them. <br/><br/>With this, the total number of APAs entered into by the CBDT has reached 140. This includes 10 Bilateral APAs and 130 Unilateral APAs.<br/><br/>The international transactions covered in these agreements include payment of royalty fee, trading in goods, IT-enabled services, software development services, marketing support services and others.<br/><br/>The CBDT expects more APAs to be concluded and signed before the end of the current fiscal. The APA Scheme was introduced in the Income-tax Act in 2012. The scheme aims at providing certainty to taxpayers in the domain of transfer pricing by specifying the methods of pricing and setting the prices of international transactions in advance. The progress of the APA Scheme strengthens the government's resolve of fostering a non-adversarial tax regime.