Deutsche Welle, 12 February 2013
The OECD
has urged an overhaul of international corporate tax rules, accusing big
multinational companies of being overly resourceful in reducing their tax
burden. The report comes ahead of a G20 meeting in Moscow.
Some
multinationals were using strategies that allowed them to pay as little as five
percent in corporate taxes, while smaller businesses were paying up to 30
percent, an OECD study confirmed on Tuesday.
The survey
commissioned by the G20 group of industrialized and emerging economies even
went as far as to say that many of the existing rules which protected
multinational companies from double taxation sometimes even allowed them to pay
no taxes at all.
These
strategies, though technically legal, erode the tax base of many countries and
threaten the stability of the international tax system, said the
secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
Angel Gurria.
No time to
waste
"As
governments and their citizens are struggling to make ends meet, it is critical
that all pay their fair amount of taxes and trust the international tax system
is fair," Gurria added in a statement published on the OECD's homepage.
The
organization said if that was not the case and multinationals were allowed to
gain an unfair advantage over smaller businesses, investment, growth and
employment were bound to suffer in the final analysis.
British and
French lawmakers are already studying ways of overhauling the tax system after
revelations about companies such as Starbucks, Apple or Google had used complex
inter-company transactions to cut their annual tax bills. The OECD said it
hoped for a multilateral convention that could replace the 3,000 bilateral
systems in place right now.
"If
there's political report to go in this direction, the two years would be good,
but it shouldn't take more time," the OECD's director of tax policy,
Pascal Saint Amans told reporters, according to the Reuters news agency.
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