Germany Urges Global Minimum Tax For Digital Giants (yahoo.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Sunday October 21, 2018 @03:15AM from the one-for-all dept.

Germany is backing a global minimum tax rate as Europe looks to levy tax notably on U.S. tech giants. "Europe is trying to devise a strategy to tax profits from the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and digital platforms such as YouTube and Airbnb which currently manage to keep fiscal exposure to a bare minimum," reports Yahoo News. From the report: "We need a minimum tax rate valid globally which no state can get out of (applying)," Scholz, a social democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government, told the "Welt am Sonntag" weekly. Digital platforms "aggravate a problem which we know well from globalization and which we are trying to counter -- the shifting of profits to fiscally beneficial regions," said Scholz. Scholz explained he had launched an initiative designed to help states react to so-called fiscal dumping in support of embryonic OECD plans designed to fight tax transparency and cross-border tax evasion. "We require coordinated mechanisms which prevent the displacement of revenues to tax havens," said Scholz. A March proposal by the Commission includes introducing a tax as a bridge measure until such time as the OECD can roll out a measure which can be applied globally.

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Re:The US will never agree to this by ShanghaiBill · 2018-10-21 04:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

EU does not need to ask permissions how to tax countries selling to their consumers.
Yes they do. It is a blatant violation of WTO rules to tax American products differently based on their origin. So they have to craft this carefully so that only American companies pay the tax and no European companies are inadvertently snagged, without explicitly saying that is their goal. One way to do this is to penalize "bigness", but that is clearly a contrived distinction, so expect this to be vigorously challenged by the US in the WTO courts.
Scholz's words will come back to haunt him. He is basically admitting to designing an illegal tax policy. It is hard to claim you are not intentionally targeting Americans when you have already clearly stated that you are.