After talks this week in Paris, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Friday that nearly 140 governments have agreed to launch a rewrite of decades-old international tax rules for the digital age.
Tax officials from 137 governments agreed at a meeting in Paris to launch negotiations on new rules for where tax should be paid and what share of profit should be taxed when big digital and other consumer-facing businesses do not have a physical presence in the market, the OECD said.
A growing number of countries are preparing national digital taxes in the absence of a major redrafting of current rules, despite threats from Washington to hit them with retaliatory trade tariffs because it sees such levies as discriminatory against big U.S tech groups.
“It’s moving fast because what is at stake is a massive trade war,” OECD head of tax policy Pascal Saint-Amans told journalists in Paris.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple CEO Tim Cook backs changes to the global corporate tax system, agreeing with the general consensus that global tax rules need to be overhauled:
I think logically everybody knows it needs to be rehauled, I would certainly be the last person to say that the current system or the past system was the perfect system. I’m hopeful and optimistic that they (the OECD) will find something. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, January 20, 2020