As early as February, the commission wants to present a law that prescribes a minimum tax of 15 percent for large corporations. 136 states have agreed on this lower limit – a global reform of the century.
The EU Commission is wasting no time in implementing the global tax reform. This Wednesday, the finance ministers of the 20 most important industrialized countries, the G20, are expected to approve a global corporate tax reform of the century. The agreement, which was negotiated under the umbrella of the industrialized countries organization OECD, provides for a minimum tax of 15 percent on the profits of large corporations. In addition, digital companies like Google should pay more taxes in those countries in which they generate a lot of sales, and less at the company headquarters, in the case of the USA. The Commission wants to cast the rules into European law so that they can be applied uniformly in the 27 member states. The authority intends to present the corresponding EU directive on global minimum tax as early as February. This is based on a draft of the work program for 2022, which of the Süddeutsche Zeitung is present.
The Commission will probably publish this program next week. According to the draft, the Brussels-based company will present a second directive in the third quarter, i.e. after the summer holidays, which deals with the worldwide redistribution of taxation rights of digital companies.
The work program for 2022 is important for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen because her term of office expires at the end of 2024. In the case of legislative initiatives that come after 2022, there is therefore a high risk that they can no longer be adopted by the EU Parliament and the Council of Ministers before their mandate expires. The CSU MEP Markus Ferber calls the announcement list for 2022 “the last big chance for the von-der-Leyen Commission to once again set a political example”. But his CDU party friend has missed this chance, complains the economic policy spokesman for the Christian Democratic EPP group: “The work program contains a lot of small and small, but no vision of what Europe should look like in 20 years.”