A U.N. Plan to Stop Corporate Tax Abuse : The Intercept

The United Nations has released an advance version of a report from Secretary-General António Guterres titled “Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations,” which explicitly criticizes the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s proposed base erosion and profit shifting 2.0 reforms.

Click here for the preliminary UN report

Summary of the article in the Intercept.  Click here to read the original full article 

The reforms proposed by the OECD reforms not ambitious enough and that they will not do enough to stop multinational corporations from avoiding taxes. The report calls for a more comprehensive reform that would include a unitary tax system.

The release of this report is a significant development in the fight against international tax abuse. It shows that the United Nations is taking this issue seriously and that it is willing to challenge the status quo. This could lead to a more ambitious reform of the international tax system, which would benefit governments and taxpayers around the world.

International tax abuse is the practice of corporations and wealthy individuals using loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The author argues that this is a serious problem that costs governments trillions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

What seems to be needed is a unitary tax system. Under a unitary tax system, all of the profits of a multinational corporation would be attributed to the corporation overall, regardless of where the profits were actually earned. This would make it much more difficult for corporations to avoid paying taxes by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions.

The author argues that the United Nations is the best forum to negotiate a global unitary tax system. The OECD, which has been working on international tax reform for a decade, is largely composed of wealthy countries that are not interested in cracking down on tax avoidance by their own corporations. The UN, on the other hand, is more representative of the world's population and is more likely to be committed to ensuring that everyone pays their fair share of taxes.

The article concludes by calling on the UN General Assembly to consider a legally binding multilateral instrument that would establish a unitary tax system. This would be a major step towards tackling the problem of international tax abuse and ensuring that everyone pays their fair share of taxes.