The Global Corporate Tax Scam Is Under Pressure
For decades, multinational companies have used fraudulent accounting techniques to evade corporate taxes with impunity. Thanks to populist pressure and national rivalries, international talks are now underway to explore reforms. The risk now is that reform ideas will be watered down, and poor countries excluded from the benefits.
A Jaguar car parked outside banks and finance-related offices in St Helier, Jersey, one of the world’s top offshore financial centers, on April 13, 2017. (Matt Cardy / Getty Images)
In the wake of the infamous “Offshore Leaks” of 2013 — a massive collection of leaked documents from tax havens published by an international consortium of journalists — the OECD, the international club of rich countries, was forced to open talks on reforming the rigged system of multinational corporate taxation. Last month, the group announced a proposal for a minimum global corporate rate to reduce evasion.
Jacobin’s Mike Beggs spoke with Edmund FitzGerald, professor of international development and finance at Oxford University and a member of the Independent Commission on the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), a network of scholars pushing for reform, about why the OECD decided to act and what progress has been made so far.
Mike Beggs
Lately there’s been a lot of discussion of internationalizing corporate taxation. Why does it appear that there’s finally been some movement on this in the last few years?
Edmund FitzGerald
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