The US on Tuesday announced its opposition to Canada’s proposed tax on the largest technology firms, warning that it “would examine all options” should Ottawa go ahead with the levy.
The US Trade Representative (USTR) said that Canada should instead work toward implementing a global taxation agreement that Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries announced last year to defuse the global tech tax row.
“As Canada is fully aware, the United States has serious concerns about measures that single out American firms for taxation while effectively excluding national firms engaged in similar lines of business,” the representative said.
Photo: AFP
It called for Ottawa to “focus efforts on engaging constructively” with the OECD negotiations, “instead of pursuing a counterproductive unilateral measure that risks encouraging other countries to follow suit.”
Should Canada go ahead with the tax, the “USTR would examine all options, including under our trade agreements and domestic statutes,” it said.
Washington has hit out at digital services tax proposals globally, which it says impose discriminatory fees on US firms such as Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google.
The office of Canadian Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland said that Canada’s preference has always been a multilateral pact.
“Canada has a clear national interest in this multilateral agreement, which protects against erosion of the tax base and will generate additional revenue” for the country, her office told Agence France-Presse in an e-mail.
“We sincerely hope that the timely implementation of the new international system” will make Ottawa’s proposed tax “unnecessary” to ensure the protection of Canadian interests, it added.
In October last year, nearly 140 countries reached an agreement on a 15 percent minimum tax under OECD auspices, leading the US to remove punitive tariffs on several countries ahead of the global tax’s imposition, which is expected next year.
Those levies were never imposed, but served as a threat to those countries that go ahead with their digital services tax.
Canada’s proposed 3 percent tax “on revenue from certain digital services” would affect companies with at least US$850 million in gross revenues and apply retroactively to the start of this year, although it would not come into effect until 2024, the USTR said.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
RSS