An unprecedented international collaboration on tax reform that recently unveiled sweeping plans to crack down on aggressive tax planning by multinational companies has the potential of becoming the biggest shake-up in international tax rules in nearly a century, according to tax professionals.
An ambitious international effort calling for a coordinated approach to rewrite global tax rules over profit shifting risks being undermined by the number of growing countries that are unilaterally introducing significant tax reforms, warn tax experts.
The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), backed by the G20 Finance Ministers, proposed in July 2013 a sweeping series of proposals that take aim at aggressive international tax planning by multinational companies in the wake of intense political scrutiny and public outcry over the likes of Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Starbucks moving billions of profits out of higher-tax countries into low or no-tax jurisdictions.
The plan, known as Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS), lists 15 specific actions that will attempt to tackle tax challenges of the digital economy, establish coherent rules for corporate income taxation, prevent tax treaty abuse, increase transparency by taxpayers, and amend the world’s 3,000 bilateral tax treaties through a multilateral instrument.