Consultant: Ring-Fencing Mining Income: A toolkit for tax administrators and policy-makers

The International Institute for Sustainable Development is a globally recognized think tank with more than 30 years of experience working to solve today's greatest sustainable development challenges. We combine deep expertise across critical policy areas with a collaborative approach to research, advice, and hands-on support that delivers real-world results. Headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba, we are a diverse team of over 300 experts working from offices in Canada and Switzerland as well as other locations around the world. 

IISD hosts the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF).

The IGF's Global Mining Tax Initiative (GMTI) helps countries to increase mining revenues for sustainable development. Drawing on broad experience working with IGF member governments, the Secretariat offers this specialized and comprehensive program covering fiscal policy for the entire mining value chain, from exploration and development to mining, processing, mineral sales, and mine closure. The GMTI focuses on all aspects of fiscal policy, including taxes, royalties, and financial modelling, and has developed particular expertise on the fiscal treatment of mineral beneficiation and downstream processing.

Background

In 2025, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the IGF jointly published Ring-Fencing Mining Income: A Toolkit for Tax Administrators and Policy-Makers, a comprehensive practice note on when and how governments should limit the consolidation of income and expenditure across mining projects and activities. The toolkit addresses the treatment of integrated operations in several places, notably its discussion of ring-fencing by shared processing facility, ring-fencing of upstream versus downstream activities, and its recommendation that transfer pricing rules extend to internal dealings within a single ring-fenced entity.

The toolkit's treatment of integration is oriented toward the design of the ring-fencing rule itself: where the statutory boundary should sit when a mine feeds a processor, and how to prevent profit-shifting across that boundary once drawn. There is a separate but distinct question to consider, namely how ring-fencing rules interact with the value-addition (beneficiation) tax and non-tax incentives that many of the same governments offer to draw investment into downstream processing. Specifically, this would include such incentives as tax holidays, accelerated depreciation, royalty rate differentials for refined versus unrefined product, and preferential processing licences. Where such incentives sit on one side of a ring-fence and the extraction activity sits on the other, the incentive may fail to achieve its stated purpose (because start-up losses in the incentivized processing segment cannot offset profits in the ring-fenced mining segment), or it may create the very transfer-pricing and rate-arbitrage risks the toolkit is designed to guard against.

The Challenge

Tax policy-makers and administrators currently have authoritative guidance on ring-fencing design (the 2025 toolkit), and there is separate literature on mineral beneficiation incentives (such as from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, International Council on Mining and Metals tax expenditure work), but there is no practice note that puts the two together: a framework for how a value-addition incentive should be designed, and where the ring-fence should sit, when the two instruments apply to the same integrated project. This gap matters because the interaction is not merely theoretical. It shows up directly in country practice already surveyed by the toolkit and by the IGF's own country work: a differentiated corporate income tax rate for mining versus mineral processing licences, a statutory carve-out permitting pooled treatment of “inseparable or substantially interdependent” integrated beneficiation operations, and processing facilities sited in export processing zones specifically to capture preferential tax treatment.

Our Response

The IGF seeks to develop a practice note on the ring-fencing implications of mining value-addition incentives for integrated mining projects, in continuation of the 2025 Ring-Fencing Mining Income toolkit. The note will take the toolkit's existing design guidance on integrated operations as its starting point and extend it to address the incentive-interaction question: how should a ring-fencing regime be designed, and how should a value-addition incentive be designed, so that the two are coherent rather than potentially working against each other on the same integrated project?

The country case set will be determined jointly with the consultant at inception stage. Candidates must include jurisdictions that illustrate materially different design choices. Such design choices include a statutory integration test permitting pooled treatment of extraction and processing under common control, a differentiated tax rate between mining and processing licences, strict project-level ring-fencing with value addition pursued through the royalty schedule rather than through ring-fencing relief, and vertical integration achieved through trade policy (export restriction) rather than through the ring-fencing rule as such. Ghana and Tanzania are both covered in the toolkit's shared-processing-facility and upstream/downstream discussions and are also considered as candidates in this study because they build directly on documented toolkit examples rather than introducing an unrelated set of countries.

 Deliverable – Technical Input for the Ring-Fencing and Value Addition Practice Note

The IGF seeks a consultant, or small consultant team, with expertise in mining fiscal policy and comparative tax law to conduct desk-based research and support the drafting of the practice note. The work is weighted toward legal and literature research rather than field consultation. The consultant will be responsible for the following tasks:

1. Prepare a short inception note proposing the for IGF's confirmation, with rationale, together with the analytical framework to be applied consistently across cases (a typology of ring-fencing design and a ) and confirming how the note's structure will map onto and extend the relevant sections of the 2025 toolkit.
2. Examine country cases where ring-fencing rules separate upstream mining and downstream processing activities alongside policies or incentives designed to attract investment in downstream value addition. Assess how these frameworks interact in practice, identify any implementation challenges or unintended consequences, and draw on discussions with government officials and other stakeholders to understand how these issues are being managed.
3. For each case study country, undertake a primary-source review of the relevant mining code, income tax act, royalty legislation, and any special licensing regime, to establish: (a) how the ring-fence is legally defined; (b) whether and how integrated extraction-processing operations are treated differently from stand-alone projects; (c) what value-addition incentive, if any, applies to the processing stage and how it is designed (rate differential, holiday, accelerated allowance, integration carve-out); (d) how transfer pricing between ring-fenced segments is regulated; and (e) whether case law or administrative guidance has tested the boundary.
4. Identify, for each country, at least one integrated project that illustrates how the ring-fencing rule and the value-addition incentive have applied together in practice, including any documented disputes with the revenue authority over the mining/processing boundary or over the incentive's effect.[
5. Where available, compile documented estimates or reasonable proxies for the fiscal cost of the relevant value-addition incentive and any evidence on whether it changed investment or beneficiation outcomes, flagging data gaps.
6. Where the desk research leaves material gaps, conduct light-touch validation (by email or short call) with country officials and practitioners to confirm interpretation of the legal provisions.

Timelines

1. Inception note proposing the country case set, analytical framework, and legal sources. Due: November 2026. Estimated effort: 5 days.
   
2. Literature review and typology synthesis. Due: November 2026. Estimated effort: 5 days.
3. Primary legal-source review and case mapping for all confirmed countries. Due: November 2026. Estimated effort: 5 days.
4. First draft and review of the report. Due: December 2026. Estimated effort: 10 days.
5. Finalization of findings in the final draft report. Due: December 2026. Estimated effort: 5 days.

Location: Remote

IISD will not apply for residency and work permits for this position on behalf of the applicant.

Candidates must hold appropriate work authorization for locations where they expect to be based.

Application Process

Application deadline: Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until filled.

This is a consultant position. Submissions must be in English.

To apply for this consultancy, interested applicants should submit the following:

• A CV (detailing your experience with mining fiscal policy, tax expenditure analysis, or mineral beneficiation policy).
• An expression of interest (one page), including proposed approach and, where relevant, proposed country case set and coverage by team member if submitting as a team.

NOTE: 

• Incomplete applications will be automatically disqualified. 
  
• Only those candidates IISD wishes to interview will be contacted.