corporate tax

Today, EU negotiators struck an agreement on the public Country-by-Country Reporting proposal. The deal means companies with operations in the EU will be required to publish information on how much tax they pay in EU countries and non-EU countries that are on the EU’s black or grey list. Information on other non-EU countries will only be available on an aggregated global basis. 

Responding to the announcement today that the OECD Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting has agreed to push ahead with the two-pronged global tax reform deal and set a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International, said:  “This is not an ‘historic’ deal ―it is history repeating itself. Those who shamelessly rigged the global tax system to their benefit over a century ago have again ring-fenced the game for themselves."

In response to the completion of the 2021 Comprehensive Surveillance Review today by the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund, Nabil Abdo, Oxfam’s Senior Policy Advisor on International Financial Institutions, said: “This Review misses a crucial opportunity to require staff to advise countries on policies to tackle inequality or systematically assess the impacts on inequality of its own recommendations."

Responding to the publication of the Fiscal Monitor by the International Monetary Fund today, Susana Ruiz, Oxfam International's Tax Policy Lead, said: “Oxfam strongly welcomes the IMF’s call for progressive and emergency taxes to fund the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, including taxing excess corporate profits and top income levels.

After almost five years of deadlock, EU governments in the Council finally backed new EU rules on corporate tax transparency today. The proposal requires multinationals to publicly report on what profits they make, how much tax they pay, and where they pay it.

The coronavirus pandemic is a crisis for everyone. All around us people are affected — our loved ones, our neighbours, our colleagues, our communities. 

Today, the European Parliament agreed a resolution calling for a “joint, ambitious EU position” in the OECD-led negotiations on how to address international corporate tax challenges in a digitalised era. These negotiations provide a historic opportunity to adapt corporate tax rules for the 21st century, and to strengthen tax justice at global level.

There is a real risk that the OECD’s proposal on the application of a new minimum corporate tax rate will only benefit a handful of mainly rich countries where multinational companies are headquartered. Countless other rich and poor countries where these corporations do business will not be able to recover lost taxes.

Under this new proposal, companies’ profits and their ability to shift them offshore will barely be affected and consequently developing countries will only see a very small increase in their corporate tax revenues. 

European Union finance ministers have removed the British territory of Bermuda, Barbados, and the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba from the EU blacklist of tax havens today.