Buy-Back contracts and its tax challenges in Iranian Oil and Gas Industry

The tendency to gain benefits of proficiency and financial resources of foreign investors alongside the Legal restrictions of provisions No. 44, 45, 80 and 81 of the Iranian constitution, caused an occasion to benefit from Buy-Back contract's capacities in order to draw the attention of foreign investors to Iranian oil and gas industry, in recent decades. Upon incorporation of foreign investors in Iran, the tax auditors have interfaced by some challenges like how to collect the income tax and value-added-tax by implementation of one of the Completed-contract method or the Percentage-of-completion method. Because of no consistency among the tax auditors to deal with this problem, the main purpose of this paper is to investigate and explaining the issue based on a Library-Based research. The results show that the INTA can use just the Percentage-of-completion method (Privileging Form Over Content) and or the Completed-contract method and the Percentage-of-completion method contemporaneously (Privileging Content Over Form) based on the dominant policies and the content of the related contracts. Moreover, based on the method of accounting for income tax, the INTA can collect the Value-Added tax too.