The Biden administration has sent signals for an agreement on a digital tax, says EU Economic Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni.
According to the EU Commission, an agreement is likely to be reached in the coming months on the question of taxation of large digital corporations such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. “We hope for a political agreement by June,” said the EU Economic Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni the newspapers of the Funke media group. Gentiloni referred to the latest signals from the USA, which under President Joe Biden are open to an international agreement at the level of the OECD countries.
“Big step forward”
“The signal from the USA is a big step forward and paves the way for an agreement,” Gentiloni continued. A global digital tax and a global minimum tax would be good news not only for citizens, but also for businesses. The companies wanted “no double taxation regimes and no longer so many complicated tax regulations that differ from country to country,” said the Italian.
Sales should be taxed
The background to the planned digital tax is that large US digital companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon hardly pay taxes in Europe. The EU is therefore campaigning for a digital tax on sales at the level of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Trump stopped talks
The G20 group of large industrialized and emerging countries commissioned the OECD in 2018 to agree on an international digital tax by the end of 2020. However, last June, under the former President Donald Trump, the USA declared a “break” in the negotiations and justified this with the corona pandemic. The background was also the presidential election on November 3, which Biden then won against incumbent Trump.
