(Washington) The European Union (EU) said on Tuesday “regrets” the decision of the new President of the United States, Donald Trump, to withdraw his country from the international agreement introducing a minimum tax of 15% on the profits of multinationals , obtained after long negotiations in 2021.
Published yesterday at 10:51 a.m.
Among the dozens of decisions taken on the first day of his mandate, and in the name of regaining “national sovereignty” and “economic competitiveness”, Donald Trump decided that the agreement signed under the aegis of the OECD had “no effect in the United States.”
To fight against the tax race to the bottom, nearly 140 states committed at the end of 2021 to introduce a minimum corporate tax of 15% on multinationals, as well as a mechanism intended to better distribute the taxation of digital giants. where they actually carry out their activity.
According to the OECD, this major tax reform was supposed to bring in more than $200 billion in tax revenue each year.
If the previous government, and former President Joe Biden, had dragged its feet during the negotiations and to integrate the agreement into American legislation, it had finally taken advantage of its large green plan (IRA), voted in 2022, to integrate a provision allowing the application of the first pillar of the agreement.
-The European Commission “regrets the content” of the White House publication, but “believes it is worth taking the time to discuss these issues with the new tax administration in the United States in order to better understand their questions and to explain our position,” reacted European Commissioner for the Economy Valdis Dombrovskis during a press conference.
In the document published by the new presidency, the Treasury Department is also asked to prepare “protective measures” with regard to countries which impose, or plan to impose, taxation “extraterritorially or which disproportionately affects American companies.
“Not only has Trump just killed the weak tax reform of the OECD, but he also threatens to destroy everything that has been built for a century” in terms of corporate taxation, reacted in a press release Alex Cobham, at the head of the NGO Tax Justice Network, which campaigns for fairer taxation.
Corporate tax in the United States fell from 35% to 21% during the vote on the major tax reduction program carried out during Donald Trump’s first term in 2017, which the new president wishes to perpetuate and even strengthen. during this mandate.
But the effective rate, therefore actually paid by companies, has been around 9% since 2018, compared to 16% in 2014, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing body of the American Congress.
