EU officials struck a deal to crack down on international companies’ efforts to dodge taxes by requiring greater disclosure, as a coordinated push by governments to take a bigger slice of corporate revenue gathers pace.
Negotiators representing the European Parliament and the governments of EU member states on Tuesday agreed to a package forcing companies with a total revenue exceeding 750 million euros (US$913 million) in each of the last two consecutive financial years to disclose data — including pretax profit or loss, and income taxes paid — from operations in each member state.
Companies would also have to report their income booked in countries singled out by the EU as tax havens.
“So much public money right now after corona is invested, so the multinationals get a lot of public money and now we get the basic information of those multinationals,” said Evelyn Regner, an EU lawmaker from Austria who is one of the parliament’s lead negotiators on the issue.
The deal still needs formal adoption before it is enacted into law. After that, member states would have 18 months to adopt it into national law.
Earlier on Tuesday, the EU launched a body to help drive policies against tax evasion and avoidance.
The so-called EU Tax Observatory would become “a hub of new ideas” that would inform the bloc’s decisionmakers by compiling data, and providing research and analysis, the European Commission said.
The moves came as members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development negotiate a global deal to overhaul tax rules and make multinationals pay more in countries where they operate.
Momentum toward such an accord has been stoked by proposals from the administration of US President Joe Biden, including a global corporate minimum tax of at least 15 percent.
“What this means is that the union is now clearly the world leader in terms of corporate transparency,” said Pedro Lourtie, representative of the Portuguese presidency of the EU.
He said that if the agreement is confirmed, citizens “will have access to tax information from the very large multinationals.”
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