According to the OECD Guidelines, critical assumptions hold fundamental importance within the discipline of advance pricing agreements. Nonetheless, only a few countries provided detailed rules on this aspect in their national legislation on advance pricing agreements. In order to urge national legislators to pay greater attention to this crucial aspect of advance pricing agreements, this article will first look at how critical assumptions are dealt with in the OECD Guidelines; then, it will analyse the discipline of critical assumptions in one of the jurisdictions with the longest and most significant experience in the field of advance pricing agreements, i.e., the United States. Comparison between the OECD and the US systems will show two different approaches to critical assumptions which will be further discussed in the remainder of this work. Finally, relying on this comparison, some suggestions to improve the Italian legislation on advance pricing agreements will be put forward.
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