The top tax official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development signaled his uncertainty over whether national governments will keep to the agreed timetable for implementing a historic global tax agreement, yet he warned there was no going back on the deal if officials wanted to avoid a further breakdown of international tax rules.
The OECD is continuing to host technical negotiations on the details of an
“We are in the middle of the negotiation,” Pascal Saint-Amans said Thursday at an event hosted by the District of Columbia Bar Association. “There is an extremely ambitious timeline. We’ll see whether it can be met.”
The negotiations concern the portion of the deal that would re-allocate some of the taxes imposed on the world’s largest multinational corporations, based on where the firms generate revenue as opposed to where they book their profits.
That component will require ratification by legislatures of countries including the U.S., Saint-Amans said.
“It may be difficult but that’s what we need to move forward, or we will have to face the alternative, which doesn’t look good,” he said. “It’s certainly not about going back to the pre-existing status quo” but about a return of divisive digital services taxes, trade disputes and further deterioration in international tax rules.
Saint-Amans expressed confidence that European Union officials would pass a directive this month enacting the other portion of the tax agreement — a 15% minimum tax — in the trading bloc. Poland
“We have 26 out of 27 countries in the EU which have expressed support for the directive,” he said. “Will they be able to bring Poland in? We think so.”
