The OECD confirms that the tax on multinationals will be delayed to 2024
Mathias Cormann, Secretary General of the OECD. /
Hungary has already vetoed before Ecofin the directive to transpose the agreement reached between more than a hundred countries almost a year ago.
The global agreement reached in 2021 to tax the profits of digital giants (Pillar 1) and with a minimum rate of 15% those of other large multinationals (Pillar 2) will have to wait. After hinting at it in May, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) confirmed on Monday that the measure will not come into force until at least 2024.
The complexity of implementing the standard in 2023, as initially planned, was made clear again last week, when Hungary vetoed before Ecofin, the body that brings together the finance ministers of the European Union, the directive to transpose the agreement reached between almost 140 countries almost a year ago.
The signatory States intend that the tax, included within the so-called Pillar 1 of the regulation and which affects digital companies, helps to prevent the giants of the sector from continuing to execute complex fiscal frameworks to pay less taxes with the development of their activity, hosting artificially your declaration of benefits in the regions where they pay less taxes, if not in tax havens.
This tax, as explained by the OCD, would affect all firms with a joint global turnover of more than 20,000 million euros per year, with a profitability above 10%. The organization's calculations suggest that this system would help redistribute more than 100,000 million dollars a year among the signatory countries.
The objective of the main promoters of this 'fiscal revolution', including the US Treasury secretary and former Federal Reserve (Fed) president, Janet Yellen, is to avoid the so-called fiscal dumping with which large multinationals create complex corporate structures to limit the payment of taxes as much as possible, taxing their profits in countries with greater tax advantages.
The tax would also arrive at a key moment in which governments need to maintain the improvement in collection to finance the expected increase in spending caused by the energy crisis. According to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network, States worldwide lose 360,000 million euros a year due to tax evasion and abuse by large corporate groups.
In 2020, for example, the collection by Companies fell by 27% in Spain, in the heat of the fall in business profits during the crisis, to just over 17,000 million euros. The figure exceeded 44,000 million in 2007.
