—
The G20 reaches an agreement to try to plug the fiscal holes that allow many multinational companies to practice tax engineering in a strictly legal manner and reduce their tax payments to minimum amounts, a problem that many attribute to digital companies, but that lead to out many multinational companies from all kinds of industries.
The agreement, for which a strong level of consensus has been reached for the first time, will allow countries to act in two ways: the first will enable the rights to be taxed to a company to be divided according to where its products are sold. goods or services, even if that company lacks a physical presence in that country. The second initiative will allow countries to agree on a global minimum tax rate, which will apply to companies that can still find ways to lower their tax payments by resorting to tax havens or mechanisms in foreign countries. The aim of the G20 is not to customize this agreement in any specific industry or company, but to create a scheme that can be applied globally and indistinctly of nationality or activity.
The thesis of many companies, who claim to pay their taxes in those countries where they generate value and not in those in which they have simple commercial tasks and, therefore, tend to pay them where their headquarters is and where they carry out Most of their research ceases to hold when they inspect the actual effective rates that these companies end up paying globally. The fact that the system allows it is simply a problem derived from superimposing a global reality such as the Internet to a weak and long-obsolete structure of borders and sovereignty, which allows each country to establish its fiscal policies with some freedom in order to define its strategies. This possibility is taken advantage of by some companies with global activity to carry out an enormously aggressive fiscal optimization, which was generating a very justified alarm because, in the end, it completely unbalances the profits towards these companies and their shareholders, while it detracts from the states and of the civil society of each country. That this type of imbalances begin to generate a consensus that can aspire to solve them is undoubtedly good news.
—
This post was previously published on www.enriquedans.com and is republished here under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 3.0.
—
Photo credit: Istockphoto.com