The European Parliament has voted to establish a new committee to continue the work of the Special Committee on Tax Rulings in light of continued pressure on European policymakers to clampdown on tax avoidance.
“In the resolution which went with the report, Parliament set out its ideas on how to make corporate taxes fairer across Europe and urged EU member states to agree on mandatory country-by-country reporting by multinationals of profits and taxes, a common consolidated corporate tax base, common definitions for tax terms and more transparency and accountability with regard to their – so far secret – national tax “rulings” for companies,” a release from the European Parliament read.
Companies giving statements to the committee included Facebook, IKEA, Amazon, Google and HSBC
MEPs voted in favour of the findings, though this won’t be up to the committee that presented the report. Instead a new temporary committee will be established to investigate for a further six months.
Elisa Ferreira, one of the authors of the report, said that it was initially difficult to get some multinationals to cooperate with investigations.
“They started by saying no: don’t even touch us, we have nothing to do with this issue. But then one after the other, they all came and some of them said ‘yes’, we are in favour of some of your proposals’.”
Michael Theurer, another author of the report, said it could have been improved.
“We could have done better, had there not been strong resistance from important actors, certain member states and the Commission. Thus we have not received a number of important documents, or many with information blacked out by the Code of Conduct group.”
Companies giving statements to the committee included Facebook, IKEA, Amazon, Google and HSBC.
The committee came about after the LuxLeaks scandal, where 28,000 pages of leaked documents showed agreements Luxembourg made with some of the world’s largest multinationals to drastically reduce their tax bills.
The exact function of the new committee will be decided on December 2, though leaders have recommended that its function and members should be based on the previous one.