The EU’s Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) has been unable to reach agreement on the European Commission’s proposed anti tax avoidance directive. The issue has therefore been postponed until the next ECOFIN meeting in June. The European Commission announced its proposed anti-tax avoidance directive (ATAD) in January. The proposed… – Continue reading
Members of the US Senate Committee on Finance have called on the US Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, to continue aggressive engagement with the European Commission to ensure its ongoing tax ruling probe does not inappropriately target US multinationals. In their letter submitted to Lew on May 23, 2016,… – Continue reading
Dubai: UAE-based multinationals will start to feel the impact of the OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) proposals that come into effect this year, a KPMG seminar on international tax developments has revealed. The BEPS proposals are focused on mitigating tax planning strategies that exploit gaps and mismatches in… – Continue reading
Reports published last week, based on the Panama Papers, cast further light on New Zealand’s role as a location where wealthy individuals around the world are able to hide their fortunes. Last month the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released millions of leaked documents revealing that Panama-based Mossack Fonseca, the… – Continue reading
The Korea Customs Service (KCS) levied 1.25 trillion won ($1.0 billion) in back taxes over the past five years from multinational companies that dodged taxes by tampering with invoices on transactions of goods and services between headquarters and Korean units, data showed Wednesday. Unpaid taxes that amounted to 97.1 billion… – Continue reading
The European Union, locked in a tax battle with the likes of Apple Inc. and McDonald’s Corp., laid down the law in its bid to rein in governments that woo multinationals with special fiscal deals allowing them to reduce their fiscal liability by booking profits abroad. The European Commission, which… – Continue reading
China is joining an international effort to tackle tax evasion, with plans to require multinationals to disclose more detailed information on their overseas affiliates, according to taxation consultants who advised the government on the new rules. The proposed regulations would make it more difficult for large companies to avoid taxes… – Continue reading
Revenue Minister Michael Woodhouse says the recent signing of the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on the Exchange of Country-by-Country Reports will help ensure large multinationals pay their fair share of tax by providing for increased sharing of information between revenue authorities. “Some large multinationals often have intricate financial arrangements in… – Continue reading
Tensions between the EU and the US over tax follow investigations into Apple in Ireland The US should be added to a new European blacklist of tax havens being drawn up by the European Commission, according to a report commissioned by the Green group in the European Parliament. The report,… – Continue reading
Authorities answer OECD call to clamp down on corporate grey area of internal transfer pricing with proposal for tougher reporting standards China is mulling plans to tighten tax reporting requirements on multinationals operating in the country to help close a ¬massive global loophole. If the plan goes ahead, multinationals would… – Continue reading
Australia announced a further crackdown on multinational tax avoidance in its annual budget on Tuesday, including the planned introduction of a UK-style diverted profits tax (DPT), that it expects to raise A$3.9 billion over the next four years. The government is creating a new Tax Avoidance Taskforce of 1,000 specialist… – Continue reading
Thomson Reuters Checkpoint has just released a special report addressing the European Commission’s Anti-Tax Avoidance Package (ATA) and other global Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) developments designed in conformity with the OECD BEPS Action 13 recommendations. The report, BEPS Filing Requirements for Multinationals Under Country-by-Country Reporting, will help multinational enterprises (MNEs) gauge… – Continue reading
The former PwC employee turned whistleblower behind the LuxLeaks scandal that implicated Luxembourg in industrial tax avoidance went on trial in the tiny European duchy on Tuesday. Antoine Deltour, 30, a former auditor at global accounting firm PwC, is accused of stealing documents from his employer before he quit the… – Continue reading
On October 5, 2015, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued final tax policy recommendations stemming from its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project. The reports, endorsed by the G20 Finance Ministers on October 8 and by the G20 leaders at their November 15-16 summit, consist primarily… – Continue reading
Embarrassing our politicians and other public figures into publishing their tax returns is muddle-headed and distracting, however briefly satisfying. What we should be focused on is not what individuals are paying to the Treasury, interesting though that is, but unreasonable tax avoidance by multinational companies. There is a danger of… – Continue reading
The Panama Papers row has failed to deter Permira and TPG from bidding for offshore trust firms, Sky News learns. Some of the world’s biggest buyout firms are queuing up to buy a string of offshore trust administrators despite the escalating global furore about the leaked Panama Papers. Sky News… – Continue reading
ANALYSIS: Despite some action from both Labor and Coalition governments, multinationals are still using accounting tricks to avoid paying Australian tax.While politicians in Canberra bicker over whether or not to cut company tax, or whether it’s acceptable for effective income tax rates to rise through bracket creep, glaring leaks in… – Continue reading
Businesses will be forced to declare how much they make in each European country and in certain tax havens as part of an attempt to curb schemes that shift profits out of the reach of tax collectors. The plan to introduce country-by-country reporting in Europe is the latest global curb… – Continue reading
The European Union’s executive wants thousands of multinationals to disclose in what member states they make money and pay taxes, an effort to close loopholes and crack down on the use of tax havens. Reacting to public anger over tax avoidance by some of the globe’s best-known companies and by… – Continue reading
Panama is a tax haven, but Mauritius is one with which India has a comprehensive double tax treaty. This complicates matters more. In popular Indian imagination, a tax haven is generally associated with Switzerland and its numbered bank accounts. But tax havens are numerous, have grown in importance, and are… – Continue reading
The European Commission is looking into advance pricing agreements (APAs) given to financing companies and other businesses to see if they constitute illegal state aid, the MNE Tax news site has reported EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager told the European Parliament’s TAXE 2 committee that her office has reviewed 1,000… – Continue reading
Their tax avoidance is costing EU countries an estimated $80 billion per year. Multinational companies must pay taxes where they earn profits and stop using aggressive tax optimization schemes, the European Union’s Economics Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said on Monday. Moscovi told French radio RTL that the EU had to put… – Continue reading
It’s easy to stoke outrage at multinationals’ low taxes but harder to do something about it. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – the so-called rich-countries club – tax avoidance by multinational companies is worth US$100-240 billion a year. That’s 4-10% of total global corporate income… – Continue reading
The number of multinational companies warning investors about the risk of higher taxes doubled in the past year, according to analysis by the Financial Times. Nearly a fifth of the US companies who warned on taxes were technology companies, the Financial Times found in a study of company filings. A… – Continue reading
Global international tax takes from multinational companies will almost certainly increase in the next 5-10 years as governments around the world look to level the taxation playing field. Commenting on the New Zealand Herald’s series examining ‘the tax gap’ – multinationals channelling earnings to lower tax regimes, disadvantaging some of… – Continue reading
The idea is simple. Firms make profits in one jurisdiction, and shift them across borders by exploiting gaps and mismatches in tax rules, to take advantage of lower tax rates and, thus, not paying taxes to in the country where the profit is made. There have been concerns across the… – Continue reading
The first Budget tabled by Canada’s new Liberal Government provides for a major crackdown on tax evasion and avoidance, and streamlines the domestic tax credits system. The Budget was delivered by Finance Minister Bill Morneau on March 22, 2016. He told Parliament: “Today, we begin to restore hope for the… – Continue reading
Multinationals with turnover of more than €750 million would have to publish profit and tax details on their websites under new European Commission plans, the Financial Times has reported. According to plans seen by the Financial Times, the Commission would impose the requirement on companies with subsidiaries in Europe as… – Continue reading
Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate has encouraged several major U.S. companies like Medtronic, Pfizer, Johnson Controls, and Baxalta to move there in tax inversions in recent months, saving them billions of dollars of taxes and protecting themselves from international competition in the process. The U.S. corporate tax rate, on… – Continue reading
Private equity (PE) populism looks to be in the news again – though in a context that’s unlikely to win too many votes for the instigators. This time it’s the UK, and Chancellor George Osborne’s latest budget. The UK Budget 2016 (the Budget) includes a significant reduction in the UK… – Continue reading
The Mauritius central bank said it has issued a banking licence to Bank of China , the first Chinese bank licensed to operate on the Indian Ocean island. Zhang Xiaoqing, who is leading a team setting up the Mauritius unit, said Bank of China wanted to provide financial services to… – Continue reading
As part of the Government’s crackdown on profit shifting by multinationals from the UK to low or no-tax jurisdictions, the Chancellor has announced in Budget 2016 a package of enhanced withholding tax measures which are designed to ensure that companies are not able to use intragroup royalty payments for avoidance…. – Continue reading
New tax regulations dealing with the issue of BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) may have a disproportionate impact on the real estate development sector as they are implemented in the UK. The concept of BEPS originates from the OECD and the G20 nations. The intention is to deal with… – Continue reading
Only the little people pay taxes. For a small, select cohort of rich Australians, the famous quote of New York property billionaire Leona Helmsley rings not as an outrage but as an inspiration. In the most recent documents released by the Australian Tax Office, there were 55 people who had… – Continue reading
The amount of tax multinational companies pay – and the amount they don’t pay – has become highly controversial, writes RTÉ’s Economics Correspondent Sean Whelan. This is mainly as a result of public outrage over legal tax avoidance schemes that big companies can use to shelter vast amounts of money… – Continue reading
Fortune 500 firms may be avoiding $695 billion in U.S. income taxes on $2.4 trillion held offshore. What do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common? Both seek an end to the use of offshore tax havens by corporate America. Bernie Sanders’ plan ends the ability of corporations to… – Continue reading
EU countries will exchange information on the tax affairs of multinational companies under new rules backed by EU finance ministers aimed at stopping big companies avoiding paying their fair share into government coffers. The rules, that should take effect later this year, are a response to growing concerns about corporate… – Continue reading
The Colorado House of Representatives advanced a measure to close offshore tax loopholes on Monday. The move comes on the heels of a new report showing companies are doubling down on efforts to stockpile profits overseas and avoid paying U.S. taxes. Richard Phillips, senior analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice,… – Continue reading
The European Commission has concluded that selective tax advantages granted by Belgium under its ‘excess profit’ tax scheme are illegal under EU state aid rules. The European Commission is looking at Member States to assess compliance with EU state aid rules in the context of aggressive tax planning by multinationals,… – Continue reading
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) welcomes the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) plan to allow all countries to participate on an equal footing with OECD and G20 countries in the implementation of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS) plan. The framework announced by the OECD early… – Continue reading
In Shanghai, Wolfgang Schäuble is urging his fellow G20 countries to put new rules to tackle tax avoidance into law. Back home, business leaders worry that German companies could be left exposed by the new rules if they are introduced unilaterally or go too far. The finance ministers of the… – Continue reading
A new report from ActionAid titled ‘Mistreated’ released this week has revealed that Zambia has 13 restrictive tax treaties that dramatically restrict the government’s power to tax global companies doing business on our soil and therefore unfairly limit our country’s potential to collect tax revenue. The report also found that… – Continue reading
During a political season in which populist fury and anger at big business is running high, two presidential candidates want to eliminate the ability of multinational firms to keep earnings overseas and avoid U.S. taxes. They also just happen to be the two most surprising and disruptive candidates in the… – Continue reading
It’s unlikely anybody was particularly surprised when Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan announced a number of initiatives to increase the amount of tax revenue; from sugar tax to a “tyre levy” to an increase in a number of existing sin taxes. But it’s perhaps the relaxing of voluntary disclosure rules that… – Continue reading
In its time, the Irving empire has had plenty of federal contracts — all of them lucrative, many of them controversial. So it wasn’t a surprise to hear that a federal cabinet committee is reviewing Irving’s $26 billion sole-source (but still unsigned) contract to build a fleet of warships for… – Continue reading
On February 23, US House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Sander Levin (D – Michigan) and Budget Committee Ranking Member Chris Van Hollen (D – Maryland) introduced legislation aimed at reducing the number of corporate tax inversions by limiting the use of “earnings stripping.” Tax inversion techniques… – Continue reading
Malta has always insisted it is no tax haven, but it employs a system which allows foreign shareholders to claim a six-sevenths’ refund on their taxed dividends, taxed at the maximum 35%. There’s a new battle lining up for the Maltese government inside Brussels: an aggressive fight against tax avoidance… – Continue reading
Amid ongoing debate in the UK on “corporate tax deals,” the British Chamber of Commerce has said the UK needs to comprehensively simplify business tax rules and eliminate loopholes that are exploited in aggressive tax avoidance schemes. On February 11, on the same day the Public Accounts Committee took evidence… – Continue reading
OECD’s head of tax policy says protectionist measures by national governments had to be avoided The risk of protectionist tax measures being taken by national governments has abated as a result of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (Beps) project, a key official has told a conference in Dublin…. – Continue reading
Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison says overseas companies selling digital products to Australians will not be able to avoid paying the GST. The so-called Netflix Tax that would see overseas-based businesses selling digital products to Australians collect 10 percent GST has entered the House of Representatives. Introduced by Treasurer Scott Morrison,… – Continue reading
