The tax avoidance pressure builds
IT’S ALL COMING TOGETHER: Corporate inversions. The Panama Papers. Those European investigations into big-name companies like Apple. And the BEPS project coming out of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As Tax Pro Katy O’Donnell reports, tax practitioners and wonks might like to say that some of those things aren’t like the others — that illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance are different conversations. But for the average voter sick and tired of stories detailing how little top corporations pay in taxes amid cuts to key government programs, it’s close enough.
Put it all together and it means that politicians, both here in the U.S. and across the way in Europe, are facing increasing amounts of pressure to clean it all up, an idea that’s raising the anxiety levels in corporate boardrooms. Take the country-by-country reporting requirement under BEPS, in which companies are supposed to report to their own tax authorities a detailed tally of what they pay to a range of governments. The OECD’s plan all along has been that those reports should stay private. But European Union politicians don’t necessarily see it that way anymore.
The Panama Papers, David Rosenbloom of the NYU Law School said recently, “captured the attention of the public, and when you capture the attention of the public, in turn you capture the attention of the politician.”
