US Congress Urged To Be Involved In OECD BEPS Project
The Coalition for Tax Competition (CTC) sent a letter to members of the US Congress on July 14, calling on them to protect American interests in talks on the work of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS).
The CTC urged Congress to take an active role in the discussion over international corporate tax policy. Highlighting the long history of the OECD in supporting high taxes, the letter contended that “the true goal of the BEPS project is to undermine tax competition and pave the way for higher taxes across the globe.”
“Because the OECD is populated by tax collectors and finance ministers, new rules being drafted through the BEPS initiative are necessarily going to be skewed in their favor,” the letter continued. “Businesses are given only a token voice.”
It added that “BEPS recommendations already released show a troubling trend toward excessive and unnecessary demands on taxpayers to supply data not typically relevant to the collection of taxes. This includes proprietary information that is not the business of any government, and for which adequate privacy safeguards are not and likely cannot be provided.”
Andrew Quinlan, President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CF&P) and CTC coordinator, argued: “The OECD advances only the interests of global tax collectors, making its work on BEPS particularly dangerous. No one is speaking up for US businesses and taxpayers, which is why Congress must get involved.”
Cato Institute Senior Fellow and CF&P Chairman Dan Mitchell commented that “Washington sends about USD100m in taxpayer dollars to Paris every year to subsidize a bureaucracy that consistently seeks to impose higher tax burdens throughout the world. The least they can do is make sure that money isn’t being used to fund a tax grab aimed primarily at US companies.”
Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist also suggested that “European Governments should make themselves attractive targets for capital rather than put tax bulls-eyes on US companies.”
Pete Sepp, National Taxpayers Union (NTU) President, pointed out that, according to the NTU Foundation, the OECD’s recommendations “would already cost American taxpayers an extra USD68bn a year. Now with the BEPS project, businesses with perfectly legitimate overseas operations could be in for additional and costly suffering through heavier compliance burdens.”
“Elected officials here have a special responsibility to protect their taxpayers from schemes like these, which impose uncompetitive tax rules from outside our borders,” he concluded.
